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With more than 21,500 stores<\/a> in 64 countries and territories, the Starbucks<\/a> coffee chain has enjoyed the image of omnipresence for so long that jokes about walking across the street from one branch straight into another have themselves become clich\u00e9d. In certain cities, it\u2019s simply the reality: Seattle, for instance, where the now universally recognised green mermaid got her humble start.<\/p>\n
But when the very first Starbucks opened on 30 March 1971, its sign bore not a green mermaid but a brown one \u2014 and a more anatomically detailed one at that. Founders Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker (friends from the University of San Francisco, all instructed in the art of roasting by Peet\u2019s Coffee and Tea founder Alfred Peet) drew the theme of their new coffee company from nautical mythology, commissioning that first version of the company\u2019s signature siren and picking a name out of Herman Melville\u2019s Moby-Dick<\/a> \u2013 \u201cStarbucks\u201d having narrowly pipped the second-place contender, \u201cPequod<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n
You can still see Starbucks\u2019 original mermaid, baring her breasts and spreading her tails, on the window of the \u201coriginal Starbucks\u201d (actually the second location of the original Starbucks, to which it moved in 1977) at Seattle\u2019s tourist-beloved Pike Place market. A site of pilgrimage for Starbucks<\/a> habitu\u00e9s the world over, the store offers not just all the drinks on the company\u2019s modern menu \u2014 from normal coffee and espresso to chai tea lattes and caramel Frappuccinos \u2014 but a sense of just how much the operation has changed over the decades.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n