Starbucks owns Peet's

[snopes]

Comment: I keep hearing rumors that
Starbucks now owns Peets coffee. Because Peets drinkers are notoriously
snobby about Starbucks, I was intrigued to know if this was true. I can't
really find any real difinitive info.

[dodger_stl]

Well Peet's trades on the stock market under the ticker PEET ... and everything I have seen market news wise doesnt say anything about this, and I would have figured that news like this would have been huge in various discussions on both companies stock.

Interestingly enough Peet's is trading at a slightly higher value that Starbucks as of this morning.

[diddy]

Originally Posted by dodger_stl

Well Peet's trades on the stock market under the ticker PEET ... and everything I have seen market news wise doesnt say anything about this, and I would have figured that news like this would have been huge in various discussions on both companies stock.

Interestingly enough Peet's is trading at a slightly higher value that Starbucks as of this morning.

Since they are both publicly traded companies, I would assume that such ownership would be a matter pf public knowledge. I don't know where to look, but it would be quite easy to find out.

Anyway, what would be the big deal? Assuming its true, it would be nothing more than Starbucks trying to reach a particular crowd of coffee drinkers that would not go to their branches. Lots of companies have multiple properties that sell similar product.

[Towknie]

The rumor probably stems from that fact that the companies share common roots. From wiki:

Peet's was the original inspiration for now-rival Starbucks. The three founders of Starbucks knew Alfred Peet personally, founded Starbucks in Seattle, Washington, as kindred spirits, and bought the coffee beans for Starbucks directly from Peet's during their first year of business in 1971. Peet sold his business in 1979 but stayed on as a coffee buyer until 1983. In 1984 Jerry Baldwin, one of the original founders of Starbucks, and co-owner Jim Reynolds, the roastmaster, with a group of investors bought Peet's four Bay Area locations. In 1987, Baldwin and Peet's owners sold the Starbucks chain to focus on Peet's, and Baldwin and Howard Schultz, Starbucks' new owner, entered into a no-compete agreement in the Bay Area.

My wife, Ms. Starbucks herself is constantly regaling me with this story.

[Errata]

Originally Posted by dodger_stl

Interestingly enough Peet's is trading at a slightly higher value that Starbucks as of this morning.

The relevant number to compare would be the market capitalization. Thats the stock price times the number of publicly traded stocks. Thus the approximate market value of the publicly traded portion of the company.

That figure is around $17 billion for Starbucks. Thats way down for the year, it used to be closer to $30 billion.

Peet's is around $400 million, which has been holding steady for the year.

Thus, Starbucks is about 40 times larger, and could probably afford to acquire Peet's if it wanted to. But as diddy points out, since they're both publicly traded, this would be public information if it happened, and it would be easy to find out.

The actual stock price is next to meaningless. It has almost no relevance on anything without taking into account other financial statistics. There are some minor psychological barriers with stock prices, so companies tend to split stocks as necessary to keep them within a certain range, and they try to pick an IPO price that looks good to investors. But the price is mostly just fluff without looking at figures like the number of shares. You certainly can't compare one companies stock price to anothers to tell anything about how those companies are doing relative to each other.

[Esprise Me]

Without knowing anything about who owns which company, I still smell an urban legend in this one.

Peet's is widely viewed as the antithesis of Starbucks. While their products are remarkably similar, Starbucks generally caters to a crowd of part yuppies and part upper-middle-class suburbanites, while Peet's tends to draw more of an alternative, hipster crowd. Patrons of Peet's and other smaller chains or independent coffee shops tend to look down on Starbucks patrons in the way that counter-culture folk usually look down at "the establishment," and to many people, the most delicious irony is for the bastion of counter-culture to turn out to be a part of that establishment. Reminds me of the rumors (also untrue) about Hot Topic being owned by The Gap.

[rosa who else]

At the risk of sounding like an archtypical FOAF, I know, I could absolutely swear I read about Peet's being bought by Starbucks in either sfgate.com or our local paper. And, I tell you, I cried.

Actuallly, I cried a lot harder when I learned they'd bought Seattle's Best. SB is the home of one of my favorite spirit-lifters: the coffee milkshake, full of fractured coffee beans and topped with whipped cream and chocolate. What I always run for when life smacks me across the knees.

Much as I despise Starbucks, it's more for its mincing little language full of "ventes" and "grandes" and other such cant, than for any economic reason. I like to annoy the barristas by ordering a "medium" or a "large" just to see what I get.

I really like coffee and I like even more getting a cup of it without having to feel trendy or make that feeling compelled to be trendy.

As I've said before in other forums here, my theory on why Starbucks is so successful it it represents the last place in the world the customer can be fussy, demanding, a "martinet" (as in "half an inch of foam") without being clubbed by the waiter.

Me, I just tell them, "if I'm going to sin, sin big, so just lay on that whipped cream."

I searched Sfgate.com and I didn't find any article about Peet's being acquired by Starbucks. The founder did die in September of this year and in January there was this story:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&sn=018&sc=146

About Peet's taking over a private Chai house. That got my interest because I had breakfast there during a bike ride down Hwy 1 last year.

I have a co-worker who's a peetsnik. She won't go to starbucks even after they opened a store on our block.

I recently heard an interview with former sec. of labor, Robert Reich on the local NPR station, he said that he drove across the country stopping at Starbucks along the way. He said that in Red states Starbucks are oases of blueness in red states.

[Halfmad]

The thing here seems to be to not go to ANY chain, but to frequent Cafe Lladro or Stumptown (which is my favorite, founded in Oregon, and only in one neighborhood in Seattle so far which is not convenient to where I live) or any other independent coffee place.

But I still have to have my crackaccinos pretty regularly...