ONE day in March, 2004, restaurant boss Bernard Green went to an auction at the Don Valley Stadium and watched the hammer came down on his £355,000 bid for the old Tourist Information Centre in Sheffield's Tudor Square.
He didn't know it then but he'd just bought the site of the first Starbucks coffee shop in Sheffield.
"There wasn't a great deal of interest. I would have paid more," said Bernard, then owner of Mama's & Leonie's pizzeria round the corner Norfolk Street.
He had intended it as a restaurant for his son Scott but shortly afterwards Starbucks made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Green has never confirmed nor denied the offer was close to a million.
Tudor Square – the coffee shop opened that October – fitted the corporate plan, according to a new book, Starbucked, on the global coffee giant.
It starts "by building a costly flagship in the middle of the city's most thriving district," says author Taylor Clark.
This is the 'hub,'
Other sites are found in the city centre then in the suburbs. These are the 'spokes.' In the United States, that's the way the company has seen off competitors.
The company has moved fast. It now has six outlets in Sheffield and a seventh, the biggest so far, will open on two levels in revamped Orchard Square by the autumn.
It's a big turnaround for a city which, apart from a lone Costa in 2001, hadn't seen any of the big coffee giants until 2004. Until then the city had been content with its own brands like Coffee Revolution and stand alone independents. Starbucks and Costa, which also has six outlets, thought Sheffield too poor to invest.
National chains only come to Sheffield when they've been everywhere else.
Clark analyses the success of Starbucks which, at the last count, has more than 6,400 coffee shops worldwide in 37 countries.
He points out its success is founded on two cheap ingredients, coffee and milk, yet it built up a customer base by offering a "third place" for customers to go after home and work and a staggering brand loyalty.
Starbucks has its detractors, some of whom think it is the epitome of American cultural colonialism. Others just don't like its slightly bitter coffee.
Starbucks has been planning world domination with an incredible 40,000 coffee shops – but have the brakes come on?
Too late for Clark's book, in July the company announced the closure of 600 stores in the US and 61 in Australia.
n Starbucked is published by Sceptre at £7.99.
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