Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Starbucks didn't start out as a colossus, or even with that as an ambition. Gordon Bowker, Gerald Baldwin, and Zev Siegl, a couple of teachers and a Boeing employee, founded the company in 1971. Each wanted out of his job and each, influenced by Julia Childs, was into food, searching for products more real and more authentic than the highly processed goods jammed on to postwar supermarket shelves. Fresh roasted, whole bean coffee would be Bowker, Baldwin, and Siegl's rebuttal to the mass market, but it could have been cheese or bread. What mattered to them was more artisanal, more handcrafted foods. At first, Starbucks sold beans and grinders, coffee pots and filters. No drinks to go. No lattes. No frappuccinos. No scones. The name Starbucks came, in a sense, out of thin air. Bowker, Baldwin, and Siegl wanted their store to look and feel like a neighborhood ethnic grocery store. Most of these places had last names – like Petrini's (Baldwin's favorite San Francisco market) – hanging over the door. When Starbucks' founders put their names together, they got something that sounded like a law firm. Sitting around one day searching for a better name, one of them glanced at a map and shouted out “Starbo,” the name of a nearby Mt. Rainier mining camp. Then came Starbucks and they all liked the resonance of it. Only later did they realize that the character Starbucks served as a mate in ... log in or subscribe to read full text