Starbucks

Starbucks Corporation is an American coffee house and coffee brand, founded in Seattle in 1971. The business has grown to massive proportions since then with 28,218 locations around the world as of 2018. Starbucks initially distinguished themselves from other venues that served coffee by providing higher quality ingredients and better taste as well as popularizing dark roast coffee. They are known as a "second wave" coffee house. "Third wave" coffee houses are also cropping up with an emphasis on lighter roasts and handmade coffee drinks. As of 2016, Starbucks had 238,000 employees. Most of the employment opportunities are within the coffee houses themselves (including barista positions), but there are also marketing, legal, human resources, finance, sales, research, management, and store development positions as well.

The first Starbucks opened on March 31, 1971. Three partners had a vision for the type of coffeehouse that they would like to go to while they were still students at the University of San Francisco. They included teachers Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl and a writer named Gordon Bowker. The coffee house was so named after the character in the Melville novel Moby Dick. Some of the products offered by Starbucks include hot and cold drinks, whole bean coffee, instant coffee, and tea products as well as cold Frappuccino beverages, juice, pastries and snacks. Many Starbucks locations also have sandwiches that may be either hot or cold and some Starbucks locations even sell alcoholic beverages in the evening.

Starbucks operates in many countries around the world. The majority of their stores are in the United States and as of 2018, Starbucks operated 13,327 within the U.S. alone. At this time, there were also 884 stores in the United Kingdom and 1080 stores in South Korea. Starbucks reported revenue of S24.1 billion in the 2017 fiscal year.