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the new store. Gordon had pressed to call it Pequod , the name of the ship in Melville’s Moby Dick . But Terry recalls protesting, “You’re crazy! No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!”
    The partners agreed that they wanted something distinctive and tied to the Northwest. Terry researched names of turn-of-the-century mining camps on Mt. Rainier and came up with Starbo . In a brainstorming session, that turned into Starbucks. Ever the literature lover, Jerry made the connection back to Moby Dick : The first mate on the Pequod was, as it happened, named Starbuck. The name evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.
    Terry also pored over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.
    Starbucks opened its doors with little fanfare in April 1971. The store was designed to look classically nautical, as though it had been there for decades. The fixtures were all built by hand. One long wall was covered with wooden shelving, while the other was devoted to whole-bean coffee, with up to thirty different varieties available. Starbucks did not then brew and sell coffee by the cup, but they did sometimes offer tasting samples, which were always served in porcelain cups, because the coffee tasted better that way. The cups also forced customers to stay a little longer to hear about the coffee.
    Initially, Zev was the only paid employee. He wore a grocer’s apron and scooped out beans for customers. The other two kept their day jobs but came by during their lunch hours or after work to help out. Zev became the retail expert, while Jerry, who had taken one college course in accounting, kept the books and developed an ever-growing knowledge of coffee. Gordon, in his words, was “the magic, mystery, and romance man.” It must have been obvious to him from the start that a visit to Starbucks could evoke a brief escape to a distant world.
    From the opening day, sales exceeded expectations. A favorable column in the Seattle Times brought in an overwhelming number of customers the following Saturday. The store’s reputation grew mostly by word of mouth.
    In those early months, each of the founders traveled to Berkeley to learn about coffee roasting at the feet of the master, Alfred Peet. They worked in his store and observed his interaction with customers. He never stopped stressing the importance of deepening their knowledge about coffee and tea.
    In the beginning, Starbucks ordered its coffee from Peet’s. But within a year, the partners bought a used roaster from Holland and installed it in a ramshackle building near Fisherman’s Terminal, assembling it by hand with only a manual in German to guide them. In late 1972, they opened a second store, near the University of Washington campus. Gradually, they created a loyal clientele by sharing with their customers what they had learned about fine coffee. Seattle began to take on the coffee sophistication of the Bay Area.
    To Starbucks’ founders, quality was the whole point. Jerry, especially, imprinted his strong opinions and uncompromising pursuit of excellence on the young company. He and Gordon obviously understood their market, because Starbucks was profitable every year, despite the economy’s ups and downs. They were coffee purists, and they never expected to appeal to more than a small group of customers with discriminating tastes.
    “We don’t manage the business to maximize anything except the quality of the coffee,” Jerry Baldwin told me that evening at the restaurant. By then we had finished our main course and begun dessert. The waiter poured us each a strong cup of coffee, and Jerry proudly announced that it was Starbucks.
    I had never heard anyone talk about a