Starbucks are absolutely everywhere – you can’t walk more than a few hundred feet without seeing one.
Scattered among city-centre’s, town’s and service station’s, they’re like McDonald’s and their name is known around the world.
However their infamous name nearly never existed.
With the impressive title of the world’s largest coffee chain, it’s hard to imagine them know as anything else.
Especially the name, ‘Cargo House’ – that just makes me think of shipping or something really boring – no offence!
Speaking to the Seattle Times, co-founder Gordon Bowker said:
We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake.
So where does the name come from you ask?
Well, Terry Heckler, Mr Bowker’s advertising agency partner said that he thought that words starting with ‘st’ are more powerful and Mr Bowker started the brainstorming process.
He said:
Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo.
Mr Bowker continued:
As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate in Moby-Dick, but Moby-Dick didn’t have anything to do with Starbucks directly – it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense.
Something stuck about the old mining town in Washington and Mr Bowker’s memory of ‘Starbuck’ – the character from Herman Melville’s classic.
Bowker said:
A lot of times you’ll see references to the coffee-loving first mate of the Pequod and then somebody said to me, well no, it wasn’t that he loved coffee in the book, it was that he loved coffee in the movie.
Well there you have it – who’d have thought a giant dick would be responsible for our beloved Starbucks.
