pre-Starbucks-on-every-corner

[KLPNO]

Hello everyone,

From the book Friends Forever:

Gen X did show up on pop culture’s radar in 1994—for all the wrong reasons. This was the year when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain died, when the movie Reality Bites was met with a col- lective shrug at the box office, and when Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir, Prozac Nation, suggested that her experience with depression and mood stabilizers was characteristic of her entire generation. Whatever window of opportunity Gen X had to make an impact on the culture of its era seemed to be closing. About the only lasting legacy its members had mustered was to make hanging out and drinking coffee in coffeehouses—pre-Starbucks-on-every-corner—a thing.

As far as I know Starbucks company was founded in 1971, so I'm not sure what point the author's making with "pre-Starbucks-on-every-corner".
Could someone explain please? The general meaning, as I see it. is that Generation X made hanging out and drinkig coffe in coffeehouses very populat.

Thank you.

 

[GoesStation]

Nowadays, Starbucks is so ubiquitous in the United States that it sometimes seems there's a Starbucks on every corner. Hanging out at Starbucks is commonplace for Americans in many places. Before Starbucks expanded, hanging out in a specialty coffeehouse appealed to a smaller, mostly young and urban set of Americans. The author says the Gen X members made hanging out in such places a "thing": a cultural phenomenon that was remarked on. "Pre-Starbucks-on-every-corner" means "before there was a Starbucks on every corner".

Starbucks may have started in 1971, but it didn't expand nationally until the late nineties. My mother-in-law excitedly brought me a bag of Starbucks coffee beans from a trip to Seattle in the mid-nineties. The name was known to us here in Ohio, but the nearest shop was probably a thousand miles away. (I acted excited to humor her, but I knew their coffee was nothing remarkable. )

 

[Tdol]

The first international Starbucks was, apparently, opened in Tokyo in 1996. The explosion was not in the 1970s.

 

[PeterCW]

As satirised in an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa enter a shopping mall and every store turns into a Starbucks as they go past.