Starbucks
...who were English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gordon Bowker. The three were inspired by Alfred Peet, whom they knew personally, to open their first store in Pike Place Market to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment. The original Starbucks location was at 2000 Western Avenue from 1971–1976. That store then moved to 1912 Pike Place; it is still open today. During their first year of operation, they purchased green coffee beans from Peet's, and then began buying directly from growers.
Entrepreneur Howard Schultz joined the company in 1983, after a trip to Milan, Italy, advised the company that they should sell coffee and espresso drinks as well as beans. The owners rejected the idea, believing that getting into the beverage business would distract the company from its primary focus. To them, coffee was something to be prepared in the home. Certainly there was more money to be made selling drinks to on-the-go Americans; Schultz started the Il Giornale coffee bar chain in 1985.
In 1984, the original owners of Starbucks, led by Baldwin, took the opportunity to purchase Peet's (Baldwin still works there today). In 1987, they sold the Starbucks chain to Schultz's Il Giornale, which rebranded the Il Giornale outlets as Starbucks and quickly began to expand. Starbucks opened its first locations outside Seattle at Waterfront Station in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Chicago, Illinois, that same year. At the time of its initial public offering on the stock market in 1992, Starbucks had grown to 165 outlets.
The first Starbucks location outside of North America opened in Tokyo in 1996. Starbucks entered the U.K. market in 1998 with the acquisition of the 60-outlet, UK-based Seattle Coffee Company, re-branding all its stores as Starbucks. By November 2005, London had more outlets than Manhattan,[10] a sign of...
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