Starbucks! Few other household names could embody the might of a relentless corporate steamrolling machine better than the world’s largest international chain of coffee shops.
Every working Starbucks opens four new outlets somewhere in the world and hires 200 new employees.
It’s logo can be seen everywhere in every city from San Francisco to Shibuya. There was one instance where I saw three Starbucks stores on three ends of the same casino, then proceeded to buy 4 caramel macchiatos (confession – can’t let two “buy one, get one free” stubs go to waste!)
Starbucks was founded in 1971. The siren logo reflected the spirit of those freewheeling years, Lennon released Imagine, Johnny Cash pens a song called The Man In Black and Don’t Make A Wave Committee changes its name to Greenpeace.
According to Howard Schultz’s book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, the name of the company was derived from Moby-Dick, although not in as direct a fashion as many assume. Gordon Bowker liked the name “Pequod” (the ship in the novel), but his creative partner Terry Heckler objected: “No one’s going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!” Heckler suggested “Starbo,” the name of a mining camp on Mount Rainier. Combining the Moby-Dick idea with “Starbo” resulted in the company being named for the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck.
The company logo is a two-tailed siren. The logo has been streamlined over the years. In the first version, the Starbucks siren had bare breasts and a fully-visible double fish tail. In the second version, her breasts were covered by hair, but her navel was still visible, and the fish tail was cropped slightly. In the current version, her navel and breasts are not visible at all, and only vestiges remain of the fish tails.
The original logo can still be seen on the Starbucks store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market.
At the beginning of September 2006, Starbucks temporarily reintroduced their original brown logo on paper hot beverage cups. Starbucks has stated that this was done to show the company’s heritage from the Pacific Northwest and to celebrate 35 years of business, however the vintage logo has sparked some controversy due to the siren’s bare chest. Recently, an elementary school principal in Kent, Washington was reported as asking teachers to “cover up” the mermaid of the retro cups with a cup sleeve of some kind.
The moral of this cautionary tale? Although you may be a big and relentless economic juggernaut, staying true to your roots can be a hard thing to do in these politically correct times, more so if your biological roots involve a mermaid who’s never heard of this most handy of inventions we call a “bikini”.
Wait ’till the government regulates caffeine!
Source – Wikipedia
PS – Looking at the trends as of late, the siren logo itself may be in the early stages of being phased out altogether, to be replaced by some abstract soulless thingamajigger!
“Lately I’ve stopped seeing pictures of the Siren on Starbucks mugs – they seem to favor just the word “Starbucks”. I also started seeing the new type of the siren as part of store decoration and on coffee packaging. She only has one tail. I guess the family-unfriendly image of a fish-woman spreading her tails is on its way out. – Deadprogrammer.com“
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