As of 29 March 2021, Starbucks is the largest coffee house company in the world, with 32,938 retail locations in the first quarter of 2021, followed distantly by coffee shop chains such as Dunkin Donuts with about 10,000 restaurants, Tim Hortons with 4,300 outlets, and Costa Coffee with nearly 1,700 stores worldwide. Starbucks' international footprint has expanded to 24,058 stores worldwide since first expanding outside the US market in 1996, with stores located in three main markets: the Americas, which includes Canada, Latin America, and the US; China and the Asia Pacific (CAP); and the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The domestic market still represents more than half of all Starbucks stores; California, with 1,863 locations, has more stores than any other state.
Starbucks was founded in 1971 in Seattle, Washington, and incorporated on November 4, 1985, to become publicly traded Starbucks Corporation. Based on the company's positive, sustained operating results, it is ranked among Forbes' Top-500 world's biggest public companies. In addition, Starbucks seeks to support the farming communities it works with through a number of non-governmental organizations with programs designed to economic and social development.
Looking at a bubble plot on the left, the smaller the population of a country is, the less number of Starbucks' stores exist. However, GDP per capita does not really affect the number of stores in a country as there exist a country with less population yet higher store number. This also implies that the existence of Starbucks' stores in a country does not contribute to the economic of a country and the only variable affecting the store number is the population.
*Click on region legend to only highlight countries in the region
Looking at the literacy rate of a country and the assumption of literate people, who have phone, can access the internet, the heatmap on the right serves the purpose to tell if these two factors affecting the number of Starbucks' store in a country. On the top left corner, there are some blocks with darker color indicating high store number per 1000K population, which means that high literacy score and high phones number per 1K population affect the store number. Although there exist two countries with high store number, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates, they are just a rare case.
Starbucks operates four types of stores: company-owned, licensed, joint venture, and licensed. Currently, the store count is almost equally distributed between company-owned and licensed. Even so, the numbers of other ownership types are continuous expansion. During the first quarter of 2021, Starbucks launched 278 new stores. The company's growth is bolstered by a low turnover of its stores. Only 443 Starbucks stores have closed throughout the company's history: 240 stores in 2009, the year of the global financial crisis; 42, in 2010; and 161 in 2011.