Starbucks Corporation is a company that operates coffeehouses. The company also sells such items as bulk coffees and teas and bottled coffee drinks to grocery stores. Starbucks is based in the United States, but it has stores in dozens of countries.
Starbucks is named after the coffee-drinking first mate in the novel Moby-Dick (1851) by the American author Herman Melville. The company was founded in 1971 in Seattle, where it still has its headquarters. In its early years, Starbucks roasted and ground coffee beans and locally sold this bulk coffee. Howard Schultz, later Starbucks’s chairman, joined the company in 1982 as director of retail and marketing. Schultz persuaded the company’s directors to open a Starbucks coffeehouse in downtown Seattle in 1984, after he visited espresso bars (coffeehouses serving coffee brewed with steam) in Milan during a trip to Italy.
The company’s name was changed to Starbucks Corporation in 1987, after Schultz and a group of investors purchased it. Starbucks became a publicly traded company in 1992. By the end of 1994, Starbucks had a chain of 425 establishments and had begun to spread its coffeehouse culture across the United States. The company’s mermaid logo became familiar.
Starbucks had established a presence in Canada with a coffeehouse in Vancouver opened in 1987. But the company began its international expansion in 1996, with coffeehouses in Japan and Singapore. Today, Starbucks has thousands of stores worldwide.
