Hank..Your characterization of Peet's history is, apparently, a figment of your imagination.
READ THIS IF YOU CAN
Known as the "grandfather of specialty coffee," Peet's Coffee & Tea has been a Berkeley institution since we started more than thirty-five years ago.
Alfred Peet opened the first Peet's store in 1966 - with a roasting machine on the premises - at the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley, a few blocks from the University of California. Mr. Peet grew up in the family's coffee and tea business in Alkmaar, Holland. After World War II, Peet worked in the tea trade in Indonesia. At age thirty-five, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and later opened his shop, roasting coffee in the distinctive style he learned from his family.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Peet's Coffee & Tea was a pioneer among other food purveyors in Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto" - a collection of European style shops and restaurants that later included the Cheese Board and Chez Panisse - whose emphasis on artisan, fresh foods spawned an American revolution.
Today, we continue to maintain the traditional values of hard work and attention to detail that are essential to creating coffees of distinction. Our Vine Street store still attracts a large, loyal following, including many who remind us they have been customers since the store opened. Our roasting facility is in Emeryville, just a few miles from our original location.
Read. Learn.
The inspiration for the Starbucks enterprise was a Dutch immigrant, Alfred Peet, who had begun importing fine arabica coffees into the United States during the 1950s. Peet viewed coffee as a fine winemaker views grapes, appraising it in terms of country of origin, estates, and harvests. Peet had opened a small store, Peet's Coffee and Tea, in Berkeley, California, in 1966
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In March 1987 Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker decided to sell the whole Starbucks operation in Seattle—the stores, the roasting plant, and the Starbucks name. Bowker wanted to cash out his coffee-business investment to concentrate on his other enterprises; Baldwin, who was tired of commuting between Seattle and San Francisco and wrestling with the troubles created by the two parts of the company, elected to concentrate on the Peet's operation. As he recalls, "My wife and I had a 30-second conversation and decided to keep Peet's. It was the original and it was better."7