What It Was Like To Go To The First Starbucks

Once upon a time, the coffee culture experience meant watching the top of a percolator coffeepot spit brown liquid into a little glass knob on the pot's lid. Once the coffee stopped burping into the little glass knob, the coffee was done. High taste, it wasn't. Unlike nowadays, where people wait for months for Starbucks' pumpkin spice latte season to start, no such frou-frou drinks existed. No, pre-1970s coffee tasted as watery as it looked. In those pre-French-roast-in-a-bag days, if you wanted extra strong coffee, you added more Folgers to the pot and crossed your fingers that you'd get a decent cup.

Although few knew it then, coffee's second wave waited in the wings, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting coffee consumer, and of course, Starbucks did actually have something to do with advancing coffee's second wave. During Starbucks' early days – first at its original address at 2000 Western Avenue, Seattle, and then eventually a couple of blocks over at 1912 Pike Place — no pumpkin spice lattes existed yet. What did exist were the raw materials for the best cup of home-brewed coffee in town — quality coffee beans from faraway places. It didn't hurt that the original Starbucks nabbed a convenient spot in the thick of the activity at the Pike Place Market. Newly minted gourmet coffee fans were lured into the shop by the promise of free samples. In short, the original Starbucks looked almost nothing like Starbucks does today. Here's the scoop.

At 35,000 feet, the world's largest Starbucks (in Chicago) is about 35 times larger than the original Starbucks. Its food counter is a wonder to behold, with a variety of artisan breads, fruit salads, and other delights beckoning the hungry and un-hungry alike. A long bar and barstool after barstool invite visitors to sit a spell. By comparison, the first Starbucks was and still is only around 1,000 square feet. From the street, it looked like a small urban bodega where you might pick up some milk on your way home from work. Inside, customers perused a shelf of goodies on one side of the store before paying for their wares on the other side of the store. Maybe about 10 or 15 feet, max, stood between the two sides of the store.

Stepping inside it today is as close as you can get to taking a ride in a time machine. Every original fixture, the counter, the hardwood floors – those are all original, right down to the coat hook that workers installed for an early regular who wanted a place to hang her coat while she shopped. Tables and chairs were conspicuously absent. People didn't linger over a hot cup of Joe like they do today. Few who shopped in that early store would have ever imagined that their favorite corner roasted coffee beanery would eventually spawn not only the 35,000-foot mega-Bucks but a worldwide chain of coffee houses.

When Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl first introduced the concept of bespoke roasted coffee beans, coffee culture as we know it today didn't exist. When people drank coffee at home in the early 1970s, it was decidedly weak and about as far from the gourmet experience as you can get. Few people sought out coffee from places like Costa Rica, Mexico, and Ethiopia. At first, Starbucks went with coffee beans roasted by Peet's Coffee – out of Berkeley, California – before the founders and their crew began roasting their own coffee beans. Early Starbucks employees filled paper bags with their bespoke, hand-scooped coffee beans instead of paper cups filled with Starbucks seasonal specialty drinks. It would take Howard Schultz buying out Starbucks in 1987 before the chain began producing its now-famous drinks. 

The emphasis on freshly roasted coffee beans played such an integral role in the early Starbucks brand that if beans had sat in the store for more than a week, Starbucks employees donated those beans to charity. Such strict attention to quality and brand is likely why Starbucks has built the brand following it has today. Generally speaking, nowadays, the average Starbucks patron visits his or her store of choice about 18 times a month. The attention to brand and bean is probably also why there is a 300-foot line stretching around the original Starbucks during store hours, even today. 

If you've ever been fortunate enough to tour the inside of an old tall ship, you'd likely be struck by visions of hardwood everywhere. Kitchen galleys, staterooms, and the lower decks were all decked out in the most available building materials of the day. This consisted of wood, wood, and more wood, judging from the photos of restored ships or even the wrecks that occasionally show their bones when the tide goes out. We offer you this short history lesson to point out the rationale behind the design of the original Starbucks. It's wood, wood, and more wood from floor to ceiling because the original owners hoped that the store would remind visitors of the ships that brought spices to the masses. Although most spice shoppers today don't go to the local Starbucks to buy spices to fill their spice racks, Starbucks shoppers in the early 70s had that option. Of course, they also stopped by the store to buy tea and coffee, but originally, spice showed up on the product lists, too.

This, of course, echoes all of the other nautical-theme accouterments that greeted the original Starbucks visitors in the 1970s. It's likely that the inside of the coffee store would have looked like many of the other shops down at the Pike Place Market. Starbucks, along with its neighbors, offered passersby the sights and scents of those tall ships that floated by in the harbor.

In the 2000s, it's hard to imagine the fall and winter seasons without ads extolling the virtues of pumpkin-flavored drinks or those red and green cups around Christmastime. For many coffee lovers, a change in coffee recipes at Starbucks is the first indication that the seasons themselves are about to change. Indeed, the drink menu for the company has come a long way since the chain's early days at 1912 Pike Place, where early customers could only get bags of roasted coffee beans, as well as tea and spice samplings. When hot coffee finally did become a thing in what is now the first-ever Starbucks store, its purpose was to provide samples for early customers. What better way to entice people to buy those gourmet beans, which in that era was a fairly new concept, than to offer people a few swigs of the roast of the day?

Nowadays, we look at frou-frou coffee through chocolate-covered whipped cream lenses, not really appreciating how novel fresh-roasted coffee beans were in the early 1970s. Early Starbucks customers felt content to watch their favorite novelty beans percolate in their home coffee pots. It wasn't until eventual Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz got introduced to foamy-topped coffee drinks that Starbucks became known as the dessert coffee extraordinaire that it is today. 

Going out to coffee with friends as a form of entertainment didn't quite enjoy the kind of popularity that such activities do here in the 21st century. While the coffee shop diner did exist in the 1970s, eating someplace besides home still had that "special treat" kind of vibe until the second wave of coffee consumption hit consumers right in their taste buds. Before the second wave, coffee drinkers just felt happy that they had a little joy juice to kickstart their day. Once the second wave hit its stride, coffee drinkers figured out that drinking coffee was so much more pleasurable if it tasted good.

Starbucks positioned itself to ride coffee's second wave. To secure their gourmet roasted beans, the three Starbucks owners – Zev Siegl, in particular – tapped Alfred Peet of Peet's coffee. Peet not only helped the three secure gourmet beans, but he eventually taught Jerry Baldwin how to roast coffee. This allowed him to bow out of his advisory and supplier role to Starbucks, eventually encouraging its independence. Roasting its own coffee took Starbucks from coffee seller to favored third space in a very short time. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the third space, it's a place where people hang out that's not work nor home but a familiar and comfortable third space – hence, the name – that gives them a place to socialize and drink good coffee somewhere off the normal beaten path.