On September 22, 1994, David Crane and Marta Kaufman sitcom Friends premiered on NBC.

The multi-cam show, originally titled Insomnia Cafe, featured six West Village 20-somethings

and headed as its primary setting, a fictional Manhattan coffee house named Central Perk,

predicting and perhaps amplifying the caffeinated culture that took a root with Generation X

and continued with millennials.

The main cause and beneficiary of the hot brown craze, a Seattle-based coffee roasting

chain founded by college classmates Jerry Baldwin, Zev Ziegel, and Gordon Browker in 1971,

and sold to current CEO Howard Schultz in 1987.

Schultz aggressively expanded the business, purchasing rivals and bullying out local competitors

to become as ubiquitous as any chain in American life.

When Friends aired its pilot in 94, Schultz's coffee house had 425 locations.

Within seasons later, when Chandler, Joey, Monica, Ross, Rachel, and Phoebe took their

final bouse, there were 8,569 locations.

Today, there are over 22,000 stores worldwide, and with 190,000 employees, its workforce

is larger than the population of Little Rock, Arkansas.

It's become the most influential eatery of the past two decades, even forcing the once

invincible McDonald's to add the Mick Cafe.

This week's Stowe Boys is Trenta-sized, because we're talking Starbucks.

Welcome to Boys The Podcast about Chain Restaurants.

I'm Nick Wigger alongside my co-host Mike Mitchell, the spoon man.

How you doing spoon man?

Bigger than a little Rock, Arkansas.

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