Starbucks seems to have a shop on almost every corner of Manhattan, and soon it will have a counter at the New York Stock Exchange. The Financial Times reports Starbucks will soon be serving its beans to traders on the floor (as if traders need *more *caffeine). As much of the actual trading moves to computers, it seems companies are looking to the exchange floor to show off their brands (wait, doesn’t New York already have a place for that?).
We called up Ted Weisberg, president of Seaport Securities, who’s been trading on the floor for more than 40 years. Weisberg says there is a cafeteria in the building, but it’s in the sub-basement, down “a series of staircases — it seems a lot longer when you’re coming up [the stairs] than going down.” He said he wasn’t sure exactly how many floors. Mostly he eats a slice of pizza for lunch – standing up on the floor.
Weisburg reminisced with us about the area on the floor that is becoming the Starbucks, which is one of few places where you can grab a seat on the floor and is named after the “senior” traders who you’d often find there:
The current location of the Starbucks is replacing an area of the stock exchange that was affectionately referred to as “Jurassic Park.” And the reason it was called Jurassic Park was that it was an area with four or five seats where the senior members could basically sit down — which was right adjacent to one of the few men’s rooms on the trading floor — where you could sit and just catch your breath. So now Jurassic Park has evolved into a Starbucks, and I guess maybe because most of the old members have since long gone, except for myself and just a few others, we will obviously no longer have a place to sit. But we will be able to drink coffee standing up if we like.
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