Schultz remains the heart and soul of the operation. Raised in
a Brooklyn public-housing project, he found his way to Starbucks,
a tiny chain of Seattle coffee shops, as a marketing executive in
the early 1980s. The name came about when the original owners
looked to Seattle history for inspiration and chose the moniker of
an old mining camp: Starbo. Further refinement led to Starbucks,
after the first mate in Moby Dick, which they felt evoked the seafaring romance of the early coffee traders (hence the mermaid
logo). Schultz got the idea for the modern Starbucks format while
visiting a Milan coffee bar. He bought out his bosses in 1987 and
began expanding.