Starbucks opened in Seattle on 30 March 1971, selling coffee beans and equipment rather than cups of coffee. Its founders, Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker, were inspired by coffee roaster Alfred Peet, who supplied their beans for two years. The name came from a brainstorm of words starting with 'St', which led to 'Starbo', a misreading of a mining town name, and then to Starbuck, the chief mate in Moby-Dick. Howard Schultz joined in 1982 and pushed the company to sell brewed coffee. In 1987 he bought Starbucks from the founders and rebranded his Il Giornale outlets under the name. By 1992, at its initial public offering, the company had 140 outlets and revenue of US$73.5 million, up from US$1.3 million in 1987.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.