I’m curious what the vibe of the store was like back then, and how was the quality of the products?
Also: Did they do much mail order business? I wonder how many indie coffee roasters there were in the 70s, and what was the demand for their products…
Thanks for the info!
Surely some Seattle Dopers?!
Surely someone here experienced Starbucks in the 70s?
BTW, it’s very hard to google information on this. You get a lot of returns from Starbucks’ site, etc., so I’m really curious…
All I got is I first experienced Starbucks when they opened their first shop in country here in Bangkok, in 1998. Now there are about 200 nationwide last I counted.
Didn’t want you to be all alone in this thread. 
EDIT: Okay, 169, according to their website.
Dunno, but I always found it amusing that the original logo was a fairly obscene image of a siren holding her legs open. Later they covered her tits with her hair, and then with the modern version, zoomed in on her face so you can’t tell what she’s doing.
I remember them selling espresso from a cart at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, ca 1979. I had never had it before, and I was not impressed at the time. The guy with the cart said I would get used to it eventually.
My only uncommon experience is visiting the short-lived Starbucks that was built into the Forbidden City in China.
It was controversial and removed not long after i visited.
We saw that Starbucks in the Forbidden City in May 2007. Was that about the time you saw it?
Yes, I see they closed that Starbucks in July of that year. Funny, I never heard about the controversy. I shoulda figured though. They’re lucky they had a Starbucks there and not a MacDonald’s.
I wonder if Starbucks ever made a decent espresso.
In the early 80’s, there was a Starbuck’s either next to or combined with a place on Third (?) Avenue in Seattle, at Pike or Pine, or maybe Union. I don’t remember the exact location or the name, except that it wasn’t Mrs. Fields. I was working on 5th Avenue and in the afternoon we’d walk down and get a just-baked chocolate chip cookie and a cup of coffee.
I always put cream and sugar in my coffee so any bitterness/burned taste would be offset by that. We all thought the coffee was great, just because it had some flavor.
The only other Starbuck’s I went to was the one in the Market.
Then another coffee place opened up in Pioneer Square. Again, I don’t remember the name – I think it was Italian – and their coffee blew Starbuck’s out of the water, especially their iced coffee.
Torrefazione Italia. Yes, they were excellent. Unfortunately, after they opened a number of locations, they were bought by Starbucks and made to disappear. The original location is still in business, owned by the original family and is called Caffe Umbria.
Yep, that’s it.
And the cookie place was called The Cookie Jar. I don’t know if it was a chain. The cookies were better than Mrs. Fields. Chocolate chip – with or without nuts – oatmeal raisin, peanut butter – the yummy basics.
Portland, Oregon, 1992 was the first time I ran across a Starbucks. It was my first ‘real’ coffee shop, I was quite impressed with the Starbucks, It was near the Portland Light Rail, “MAX.”
I went to the University of Washington during the 80s and while I do remember seeing a few shops around town, I never tried them because I didn’t drink coffee then. I’m not sure if there was a Starbucks in the U-District at that time.
A friend of mine used to work at a cookie place near the market; I wonder if that was it.
Can’t really shed any light for the OP, but I get a strange hometown vibe when I go to a shopping mall near Boston. They have a Starbucks, a Nordstrom, and a Sur La Table; those three stores were probably founded within an area smaller than the mall.
The Cookie Jar was downtown – Third and Union or thereabouts. But they may have had one in the market too.
My favorite food in the market was – wait for it – the fried chicken livers.
I saw it in 2005, so I guess it lasted another couple years.
The wife and I actually have a lot to be thankful for regarding Starbucks. Until that first shop here opened in 1998, Thailand was the Land of Nescafe. That’s all pretty much anyone drank, that’s all the vast majority of restaurants served, the sole exception seeming to be eateries in five-star hotels. That was a big highlight of going to the Hilton or some similar hotel for their Sunday brunch, for the chance to drink a decent cuppa joe, especially back when I was living way up at the edge of the country in the North. I seem to recall there was one place too in the backpacker haven of Khao San Road that did offer a cup of drip coffee, but it wasn’t practical to travel over there all the time. You could also find some traditional “bag coffee” at small, mainly ethnic-Chinese stalls, mostly in Chinatown, and this was quite strong, rather industrial strength, but this was impractical for every-morning consumption unless you had business in Chinatown. No, it was Nescafe, Nescafe, Nescafe all the way down for the most part. We had a drip coffee maker, but even the supermarkets were light on drip-coffee offerings, and even then that was just Folgers and the like, and difficult to find to boot. It didn’t help that Nescafe pushed big ad campaigns portraying itself as a prime Western product favored by the really beautiful people.
I recall one trip in particular to Hong Kong where the wife and I brought back pounds and pounds of good coffee for our maker. Had Customs stopped us in Bangkok, they would have been mightily bemused, because while most Thais like my wife travel to Hong Kong to snap up luxury goods, here we were with just coffee.
Then Starbucks opened in 1998, and after tasting it I damned near got down on my knees in worship. Slowly over the ensuing years, other shop brands, both chain and individual, started popping up. Coffee World is now a ubiquitous Thai chain that rivals Starbucks. There are other international chains too such as from Japan. They’re everywhere today, and it’s not difficult at all to find a decent cup of java.
We have American friends who used to live in Indonesia but had gotten married here in Thailand back when they lived here in the 1980s. As they were preparing to return home, they decided to make a trip up the Malay Peninsula from Singapore and pay Thailand a return visit first. The husband is an engineer and had some work to finish up, so the wife and her visiting sister went ahead, with plans to meet the husband here in Bangkok. This was in 1999, and Starbucks still had only one or two, maybe three locations in Bangkok, hadn’t gone nationwide yet. Our friends were from Denver and always supported local coffee shops over the “evil corporate Starbucks.” But even our friends admitted that after years of instant coffee and at the end of the long slog up the peninsula, they too just about dropped to her knees in thanks when she spotted Starbucks in Bangkok.
So a sincere thanks to Starbucks for getting the ball rolling and introducing decent coffee to Thailand. To this day, we still buy almost all our drip stuff for home at Starbucks. We live in central Bangkok, and while it’s not a touristy area, there are two Starbucks literally within a five-minute walk away and a third one 10 minutes away along with several other coffee brands such as the aforementioned Coffee World (at least two of those), and we have Starbucks to thank for all of that.
You consider that obscene?
