Starbucks

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For other meanings of the name "Starbuck", see Starbuck.

Template:Infobox Company $5.294 billion USD (2004)|

 homepage       = starbucks.com

}} Starbucks (Template:Nasdaq, Template:Sehk) is a large multinational chain of coffee shops with corporate headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Its coffee shops in the U.S. are especially popular among students and young urban professionals. The company was in part named after Starbuck, a character in Moby Dick, and its insignia is a stylized cartoon siren.

In addition to coffee, Starbucks shops also serve other drinks, both hot and cold, and pastries. Many of their stores are inside other retail locations such as supermarkets and bookstores. As a general rule, Starbucks does not offer promotional prices on its products, which tend to be higher than those of competitors.

According to the company's fact sheet, as of February 2006, Starbucks had 6,216 company-operated outlets worldwide: 5,028 of them in the United States and 1,188 in other countries and U.S. territories. In addition, the company has 4,585 joint-venture and licensed outlets, 2,633 of them in the United States and 1,952 in other countries and U.S. territories.

Currently the members of the company's board of directors are Jim Donald, Barbara Bass, Howard Behar, Bill Bradley, Mellody Hobson, Olden Lee, Greg Maffei, Howard Schultz, James Shennan, Javier Teruel, Myron Ullman, and Craig Weatherup.

1 History
- 1.1 Name and logo
2 Inside Starbucks
3 Hear Music
4 Starbucks in pop culture
5 Criticism and Controversy
6 See also
7 External links

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History

The first Starbucks was opened in Seattle in 1971 by three partners—English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gordon Bowker. The three were inspired by Alfred Peet, who they knew personally, to open their first store in Pike Place Market to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment. (This location is still open today, though it is not in the same exact location it was when it opened.) During their first year of operation, they purchased green coffee beans from Peet's, then began buying directly from growers.

Entrepreneur Howard Schultz joined the company in 1982, and, after a trip to Milan, suggested that the company sell coffee, espresso, and cappuccino drinks as well as beans. The owners rejected this idea, believing that getting into the beverage business would distract the company from its focus. To them, coffee was something to be prepared in the home. Certain there was much 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, led by Baldwin, took the opportunity to purchase Peet's. (Baldwin still works there today.) In 1987 they sold the Starbucks chain to Schultz, who rebranded his Il Giornale outlets and quickly began to expand. Starbucks opened its first locations outside Seattle in Vancouver, British Columbia (at Waterfront Station) and Chicago, Illinois that same year. The first Starbucks location outside of North America opened in Tokyo in 1996, and Starbucks now has outlets in 30 additional countries. Starbucks entered the U.K. market in 1998 with the acquisition of the then 60-outlet Seattle Coffee Company, re-branding all its stores as Starbucks.

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By the time of its initial public offering on the stock market in 1992, Starbucks had grown to 165 outlets. In April 2003, Starbucks added nearly that many new outlets in a single day by completing the purchase of Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia from AFC Enterprises, bringing the total number of Starbucks-operated locations worldwide to more than 6,400. Counting stores not owned by the company, there are currently more than 10,800 Starbucks locations worldwide, although none, as yet, in Italy, Schultz's original inspiration.

Starbucks' success in the U.S. market has often, though not always, been replicated around the world; it has faced competition in markets which are already saturated with coffee products, though Starbucks consistently distinguishes itself with its quality of service and of product. A number of retailers have emulated Starbucks' business model, many owned by former Starbucks employees who founded their own businesses upon their knowledge of Starbucks' operations.

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Name and logo

According to Howard Schultz's book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, the name of the company was derived from Moby Dick, although not in as direct a fashion as many assume. One of the company's founders, a Moby Dick fan, had suggested the name "Pequod" after the ship in the novel. Thinking it sounded a little too much like a slang term for urine, the other founders voted it down. Another suggestion was "Starbo," the name of a mining camp on Mount Rainier. The Moby Dick idea and "Starbo" came together and the company ended up named for the Pequod's first mate, Starbuck.

The company logo is a siren (sometimes referred to as a mermaid, but it is more likely a melusine since it has two tails). The logo has changed over the years to avoid offense. In the first version, the Starbucks siren had bare breasts and a fully visible, double fish tail. In the second, streamlined version, her breasts were covered by hair, but her navel was still visible, and the fish tail was cropped slightly. In the current version, her navel and breasts are not visible at all, and only vestiges remain of the fish tails. The original logo can still be seen on the Starbucks store in Seattle's Pike Place Market.

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Inside Starbucks

Starbucks stores serve a variety of freshly brewed coffees, which change on a weekly basis in order to provide customers with an easy way to sample a variety of coffees and blends. However, most of its revenue does not come from coffee, but from blended products that combine coffee or other flavors with large amounts of milk, sugar, and/or granulated ice.

Starbucks' whole-bean coffee is roasted in one of two roasting plants, either in Kent, Washington, or York, Pennsylvania. These whole beans are available for purchase at all Starbucks store locations and in many grocery stores.

Starbucks is known for the novel slang of its menu, substituting "tall," "grande," and "venti" for the more traditional "small," "medium," and "large." (In addition to these sizes, there is also a "short," the smallest Starbucks coffee size at 8 oz., but it's not listed on the menu.) Additionally, most coffee drinks can be customized in some way, for example using skim milk instead of cream or mixing regular and decaffeinated coffee to make a "half-caf." Flavored syrups and whipped cream can be added; cappuccinos can be made with more foam ("dry") or less foam ("wet"). To the uninitiated, then, long-time Starbucks customers who know their favorites by heart can seem to be speaking a foreign language when they order.

There are usually two to four baristas (or "partners," as Starbucks employees are called) in each store at any one time, depending on the shift. Starbucks baristas who wear a black apron are known as "Coffee Masters." In addition to comprehensive training in coffee brewing and serving, they have been educated in the growing and roasting aspects of the coffee industry.

Most stores are internally divided into the backline, where the baristas work and serve customers, and the back, which consists of the storeroom, bathrooms, and so on. Unless it is very small, the store also has a café section where the customers can sit down to consume their drinks.

Behind the counter, the floor is divided into three distinct sections. These are:

The POS (Point of Sale or cash register): This is where orders are placed, called, and paid for. Pastries are served from here as well as brewed coffees and teas.
The Beverage Station: This area is usually broken down into two sections, the Espresso Bar and the Cold Beverage Station. The Espresso Bar is where most hot beverages are made, even if they don't require espresso shots, except for the Coffee of the Week and brewed tea. The Cold Beverage Station is where Frappuccino drinks and iced teas and coffees are made and served. If there is a high demand for cold drinks there may be a barista specifically for the Cold Beverage Station, otherwise a single barista handles the whole Beverage Station, with help from the Floater barista if necessary.
The Digital Brewer and Pastry Case: These are usually placed close to each other on the opposite side of the register from the Espresso Bar. The Digital Brewer is where all the Coffees of the Week are brewed and served. This is never a primary position, unlike the others, since it is a low-demand, low-difficulty station, and is usually handled by the barista operating the register or by the Floater.

The three primary roles that baristas take on (and swap off on during a shift) are thus POS (register), beverages (making and serving drinks), and floater (miscellaneous duties including making Frappuccino beverages and "café", the duty of cleaning tables and otherwise taking care of the customer area).

Some stores might also have a barista at the Frappuccino bar (also known as "Frappland") or an inventory barista at the back of the store. Busy stores might even have two baristas at one station, especially at the espresso bar on busy days or at the Frappuccino station during the summer. If the Starbucks has a drive-through, it may have one to three baristas assigned solely to serve customers in cars.

A regular shift's workers includes the baristas and the shift supervisor, often a more experienced barista promoted to the position. The shift supervisor (just "shift" for short) is in charge of managing the store when the assistant manager is not working. The "shift" also will take on the role of floater as necessary to resolve bottlenecks.

Howard Schultz has talked about marketing Starbucks as people's "third place" (besides home and work) to spend time, and the stores are designed to make this easy and comfortable. The café section of the store is often outfitted with comfortable stuffed chairs and tables with hard-backed chairs. There are ample electrical outlets providing free electricity for patrons using or charging their portable music devices or laptop computers. All stores in the U.S. and also in some other markets also have wireless Internet access (although this access is not free, as it is in some independent coffee shops). It is not uncommon to see people working in a Starbucks for hours at a time.

The company is noted for its non-smoking policy at all its outlets, despite predictions that this would never succeed in markets such as Germany, where there otherwise are few restrictions on smoking. A single outlet in Vienna, which has a smoking room separated by double doors from the coffee shop itself, is the closest the company has come to making an exception. However, Starbucks generally does not prohibit smoking in outside seating areas. According to the company, this is to ensure that the coffee aroma is not adulterated. The company also asks its employees to refrain from wearing strong perfumes for similar reasons and to cover the Starbucks logo on their uniform when they go on a smoke break.

The employee handbook has other rules for employees to ensure that the Starbucks customer experience is not compromised. For example, employees who work two jobs are scrutinized for conflicts of interests, and romantic relationships between supervisors and employees who work for them are moved outside of the workplace by transferring one or the other to a different store. Employees cannot accept gifts and invitations from customers except where refusal "may cause offense."

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Hear Music

Template:Main Hear Music is the brand name of Starbucks' retail music concept. Hear Music began as a catalog company in 1990 and was purchased by Starbucks in 2000.

The Hear Music brand currently has three components: the music that each location plays and the accompanying XM radio channel (XM 75); in-store CD sales, including Starbucks exclusives; and specially branded retail stores.

The first Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouse is in Santa Monica, California on the Third Street Promenade, and two more locations recently opened, one in Miami, Florida in South Beach and one in San Antonio on the Riverwalk. There is also a Hear Music Store in Berkeley, California. Forty Starbucks locations in Seattle and Austin, Texas also have Hear Music "media bars", kiosks that lets customers create their own mix CDs using tablet-based PCs.

The music section in Chapters, a Canadian bookstore chain, was at one time a licensed version of the Hear Music concept, but Chapters no longer uses the brand name.

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Starbucks in pop culture

Starbucks has had many references in pop culture, many of them spoofing the chain's ubiquity. Among them:

In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart goes into the mall to get an ear piercing. On his way to the ear-piercing place, Bart passes at least two Starbucks, then a soon-to-be-opening Starbucks, all adjacent to each other. When he gets to the ear-piercing place, he tells the guy that he wants his ear pierced, then the guy tells him "Better hurry up! In five minutes, this place is becoming a Starbucks!" Bart then walks out with his new piercing (and a Starbucks beverage) with every single store in the mall a Starbucks.
The movie Fight Club depicts anti-capitalist guerrillas destroying a chain coffee house (a thinly veiled Starbucks) similar to the attack on a branch of Starbucks during the WTO meeting in Seattle
Comedian Lewis Black's rants about "a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks" in his 2002 special and album The End of the Universe. The stores referred to by Black are located at the intersection of Shepherd and West Gray, down the street from the Laff Stop in Houston. Two Starbucks across the street from each other was also the basis for a gag in the movie Best in Show in 2000 (Harry Shearer had seen this configuration of stores at Robson and Thurlow in Vancouver, BC, where the film was shot), as well as for the parody Farbucks coffee chain in the movie Shrek 2.
Nick Hornby satirizes Starbucks' pervasiveness in A Long Way Down.
In the 1998 film You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks' character describes the power that Starbucks and other similar places have on people: "The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!"
In the 1999 movie Austin Powers: the Spy Who Shagged Me, Number 2 (Robert Wagner) was suggesting to Dr. Evil that he should invest in Starbucks.
Underpants Gnomes, a South Park episode, deals with a Starbucks-like coffee chain.
The Forbidden City in Beijing, China (accessible in the past only by Chinese royalty) now features a Starbucks location for the benefit of Western tourists.
Singer-songwriter Mike Doughty has written and recorded a song titled "Busting up a Starbucks".
In Shrek 2, during the attack by the giant gingerbread man, various townspeople can be seen fleeing from one Starbucks to another.
An article in the satirical newspaper The Onion announced "Starbucks begins sinister phase II of operations." (At the time, Starbucks had in fact started an expansion plan known as "Phase II," though it turned out to be somewhat less than sinister.)
Two cartoons on www.illwillpress.com (starring Foamy the squirrel) called "Small, Medium, Large" and "Coffee House Propaganda" take place in a Starbucks-like coffee shop called "Starschmucks Coffee."
In the anime Yu-gi-oh the characters Anzu and Yami no Yugi are seen at a Starbucks-like coffee shop.

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Criticism and Controversy

Starbucks has found itself the target of criticism and the subject of controversy as it has grown.

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Globalization

Starbucks has come to be regarded by some, particularly the anti-globalization movement, as a poster child of the problems posed by globalization. Several online activism groups maintain websites criticizing the company's fair-trade policies, labor relations, and environmental impact, and holding it as a prime example of what they see as U.S. cultural and economic imperialism. Branches of Starbucks have been attacked by protestors, such as those against the WTO (see also WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity).

Although it has endured much criticism for its purported monopoly on the global coffee-bean market, Starbucks purchases only 3% of the coffee beans grown worldwide. The company has recently introduced a line of fair trade products and now offers three options for socially conscious coffee drinkers.

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Quotes on cups

In 2005, the company began to print quotations on its paper coffee cups. One of these drew criticism from groups including Concerned Women for America:

The Way I See It #43: My only regret about being gay was that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people that I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short. — Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City series and the novel The Night Listener.

Although the other cups promoted a wide range of ideas, critics singled out this quotation for allegedly promoting homosexuality. The Starbucks at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, removed cups featuring the Maupin quote after complaints from a staff member. Starbucks, however, has no plan to pull the cup from the program.

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Planned Parenthood

In August 2005, pro-life groups criticized Starbucks for including Planned Parenthood in their employee matching funds program. [1] It is not clear whether this policy is still in effect; it is no longer mentioned on Starbucks' or Planned Parenthood's websites.

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Trademark litigation

In 2000 San Francisco cartoonist Kieron Dwyer was sued by Starbucks for copyright and trademark infringement after creating a parody of its mermaid logo. Starbucks won a preliminary injunction prohibiting Dwyer from selling items bearing his version of the trademark. The case was later settled.

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Labor disputes

On May 17, 2004, Starbucks' workers at the 36th and Madison store in midtown Manhattan organized for the first Starbucks barista union in the United States. The 12 workers, with assistance from the Industrial Workers of the World IU/660, submitted union cards to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a certification election. The baristas complained that a starting wage of $7.75 an hour was not a living wage in New York City and that Starbucks refused to guarantee regularity of hours per week, which they claimed led to extreme precarity.

On July 22, 2004, the Retail Workers' Union IU/660 filed an unfair labor practice charge against Starbucks for allegedly making threats of wage cuts, giving bribes, and selectively enforcing no-distribution policies to alter the results of the barista's union vote. The IU/660 has also joined with Global Exchange in calling on Starbucks to purchase at least 5% of the store's coffee from fair trade certified sources. Currently only 1% of Starbucks' coffee is fair trade certified, although they claim to pay fair, above-average prices for all their coffee.

On January 14, 2005, charges stemming from a march at the 2004 Republican National Convention were dropped against Starbucks' baristas' union co-founder Daniel Gross. Witnesses allege Starbucks' managers coordinated with the NYPD to single out Daniel Gross and another union activist from a crowd of 200 peaceful protesters. Witnesses also claim to have incontrovertible video tape evidence that shows the arresting police officer(s) fabricated evidence including filing a false police report. The dismissal charges came two weeks after the NLRB issued a complaint against the company [Starbucks] alleging that management made threats, gave bribes, and created an impression of surveillance in a failed effort to defeat the first-ever union of Starbucks café workers in the United States.

The world's first Starbucks strike happened in Auckland, New Zealand at 2pm November 23, 2005. Organised by Unite Workers Union [2] it took place as the opening industrial action of the Supersizemypay.com campaign, which is fighting for the abolition of youth rates and for secure hours and a minimum wage of NZ$12 an hour. The strike began at the Karangahape Road store and involved several other Auckland branches. The campaign continued until March 2006, when the company settled with the Union, giving substantial pay increases, increased security of hours and a big movement on youth rates.

The company does offer benefits such as health insurance to workers who put in as little as 20 hours a week. Many American companies do not offer such benefits to part-time employees.

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