5 Things You Didn't Know: Starbucks

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They are largely responsible for turning a diner’s 50-cent cup of joe into a travesty, or at the very least, a pedestrian pursuit. Their "stores" seem to be everywhere, and they’re populated by coffee snobs on both sides of the counter. They appear either indifferent to, or beyond the reach of, fluctuating economies. They are accused of everything from the annoying (market saturation) to the serious (anti-competition), yet Starbucks — the world’s biggest coffee peddler — keeps on peddling.

There may be no better example of the company’s imperialist domination — and the scorn they sometimes inspire — than the shocking installation of a Starbucks store in Beijing’s Forbidden City in 2000. You can’t blame Starbucks for salivating over the real estate; almost 9 million people visited the former home to 24 different Chinese emperors in 2006. Nonetheless, it took seven years of protesting, 500,000 signatures and a refusal on Starbucks’ part to sell other brands to finally drive them out in 2007.

Love 'em or hate 'em, here are five things you may not know about Starbucks, your friendly, ubiquitous coffee house.



1- On average, two new Starbucks have opened every day since 1987

Starbucks has been around since 1971, but it wasn’t aggressive about expansion until 1987, when the company came under the ownership of its current chairman, Howard Schulz. At that time, there were only nine Starbucks stores.

Today, there are about 14,396 (give or take a few). Divide that number by 20 years, or 7,300 days and, after rounding up, you get an average of 2 stores per day opening every day for the last 20 years. Naturally, this figure does not include the few stores that, for whatever reason, were shut down.



2- Its name comes from Moby Dick

Confirmed by the company’s current fact sheet, Starbucks was named for the first mate of the Pequod in Melville’s. The question is, why? After all, the company seems more like Captain Ahab than Starbuck. In the famous novel , Starbuck and Ahab are at opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum: the first mate is superstitious and conservative, Ahab is narcissistic and monomaniacal. Starbuck is practical, opposing Ahab’s desire to commit the Pequod to circling the world’s oceans in search of the white whale in favor of a commitment to harpooning whales they can sell on the Nantucket Market. Ahab is single-minded, bent on not only killing the white whale, but also on relieving mankind of the source of its evil. Swap out a few of the right words above with terms like "market domination" and "its competition," and you have Ahab’s, the world’s biggest coffee peddler.

The only ostensible Starbuck-like thing about Starbucks is the conservative evolution of its logo. It used to feature a bare-breasted mermaid but has, over time, developed a degree of modesty that would please the Pequod’s first mate: Initially, her hair covered her breasts, then they were cut out of the frame altogether.



3- Its founders sold Starbucks in 1987 to build Peet's Coffee & Tea

1966: Alfred Peet opens Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Berkeley, California.

1971: Jerry Baldwin and two other friends of Alfred Peet open the first Starbucks in Seattle.

1982: Howard Schultz joins Starbucks.

1984: Baldwin et al buy out Peet’s.

1987: Baldwin et al sell Starbucks to Schultz to focus on building Peet’s.

Here’s the condensed company time line:It's not all about coffee and biscotti at Starbucks...