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1 Company Profile In 1971, English teacher Jerry Baldwin, History teacher Zev Seigel and writer Gordon Bowker who shared a love of fine coffee and exotic teas invested US$ 1,35 0 each and borrowed another US$ 5,000 from a bank to open up a store called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice in the tourist s Pikes Place Market in Seattle. La ter the name was changed to Starbucks Coffee Company (Thompson & Strickland, n.d.). Starbucks is named after coffee-loving first mate in Herman Melville s Moby Dick and also because the thought of the name evoked the romance of high seas and the seas faring tradition of early traders. The Starbucks logo is a two-tail ed mermaid encircled by the store s name (Thompson & Strickland, n.d.). The store was an immediate success, with sales exceeding expectations. Stores opened in different parts of the US. Entrepreneur Howard Schultz joined Starbucks as a marketing executive in the early 1980s and acquired the company i n 1987 (Cateora & Graham, 2007, p. 597). Starbucks went public in 1992 and has done extremely well, turning an everyday beverage into a premium product. According to the company s mission statement Starbucks sees itself as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining [its] uncompromising principles while it grows (Starbucks, 2007).