That's that me espresso: What’s inside world's first Starbucks store, roastery?

SEATTLE, USA — “This is where it all began… My dream to build a company that fosters respect and dignity, to create a place where we can all come together over a cup of coffee. Onward with love, Howard Schultz.”

The words of the former Marketing director, who would later on become the owner and Chief Executive Officer, of one of the world’s biggest, if not largest, coffee chains today, Starbucks, still greets visitors as they enter the coffee chain’s 1912 Pike Place store, one of the brand’s first ever stores and the only one from the brand’s original founders that is still open today.

Originally founded in Seattle’s Pike Place Market on March 30, 1971 by former University of San Francisco students Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl as a coffee bean wholesaler, Starbucks was inspired by “Starbo,” a mining town in Washington State’s Cascade Range. “Starbucks” also coincidentally sounds like '“Starbuck,” the name of the chief mate in “Moby-Dick,” although “’Moby-Dick’ didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly,” said Bowker.

Records show that from 1971 to 1976, the first Starbucks store was originally at 2000 Western Avenue. Today, Google Maps images show the address is now part of a harbor front across the present location of the Pike Place Market.

The founders then moved Starbucks to 1912 Pike Place Market, its present location. At the beginning, the store only sold coffee beans from its supplier, Peet’s Coffee & Tea. In 1984, Starbucks bought Peet’s Coffee & Tea. 

Apart from still having the original 1971 to 1987 “woodcut” logo of the topless Starbucks siren with fully visible double fish tails in its store signage and merchandise, the Pike Place Market store exclusively carries its namesake signature blend, which comes in the forms of both coffee beans and instant mix.

Just a 15-minute walk from 1912 Pike Place Market is the first Starbucks roastery in the world, which is about to mark its 10th anniversary in December. Like the 1912 Pike Place Market store, the roastery has a logo patterned after the original Starbucks siren.

“We are the first out of six roasteries in the world, three in the country. We are a very, very small part of Starbucks.