How you know Seattle has too fucking many Starbucks [View all]

[jmowreader]

This is Starbucks Center, corporate headquarters for the global coffee leviathan. Starbucks Center used to be Sears' west coast catalog fulfillment warehouse; at 2.1 million square feet it is the biggest building in the state of Washington that isn't owned by Boeing. (It's right next to the Seattle railhead; the plan was for Sears to receive boxcars full of mailed orders then ship merchandise to customers via Parcel Post on other boxcars. Until Sears got out of the catalog-sales business, the plan worked just fine.) It is at the corner of Utah Ave. South and Walker Street. And as one would guess, there is a Starbucks store in this building.

If you go east on Walker Street exactly one block to 1st Avenue, there's another Starbucks.

Interestingly enough, the Fred Meyer chain of general stores, which serves Starbucks in its stores everywhere else, doesn't serve Starbucks in Seattle; there they serve Tully's, another Seattle-based coffee company that runs its operations out of - this is no shit - an abandoned brewery.