Three Seattle friends started the company – Gordon Bowker, Jerry Baldwin, and Zev Siegl. Bowler was a writer, Baldwin was an English teacher and Siegl was a history teacher.
The original name of the first store, opened in 1971, was Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spices. Starbucks was named after Starbuck, first mate of the whaleship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
By the time Siegl sold out in 1980, Starbucks had six retail outlets and was selling beans wholesale or restaurant and supermarkets.
In 1984, Starbucks bought out Peet’s Coffee and Tea. Jerry Baldwin decided to focus on Peet’s selling Starbucks for $3,800,000 to Howard Schultz, his former head of marketing.
On April 6, 1986, the first Italian-style II Giornale coffeehouse opened. It was tiny, 700-square food store near the main entrance to Seattle’s tallest building.
On its first day of business, almost 300 customers stopped by. Within six months of opening, it was serving 1,000 customers a day.
In addition to opening stores in the United Sates, Starbucks expanded abroad to Canada in 1987, Japan (1996), the United Kingdom (1998) and then to Continental Europe and the Middle East.
Starbucks opened its first store in China in 1999. By 2010, the company had 400 stores in China and400 more in Hong Kong.
In May 1998, Starbucks acquired the Seattle Coffee Company. At the time of the purchase it had 56 retail units.
By 2005, Starbucks had 469 stores in the United Kingdom, which made it the third largest countries, after the United States and Japan, to serve Starbucks coffee.
History of Starbucks
