9 Things Washingtonians Get Wrong About Their Own State

Many longtime Washington residents repeat the state’s rain reputation right along with tourists.

The numbers don’t back it up the way people assume, though.

That’s just the first of many facts Washingtonians get wrong about their own state.

Note: This is general information about Washington tax and sales-tax law, not financial or legal advice. Rates and thresholds are subject to change, so confirm the current numbers with the Washington State Department of Revenue.

1. Boeing’s Home Address

Does Washington still run Boeing’s front office near the Space Needle?

Not since 2001.

Boeing moved its headquarters out of Washington that year, first to Chicago, then to Arlington, Virginia in 2022, chasing proximity to federal regulators and Congress.

Roughly 66,000 people still build airplanes for Boeing around Puget Sound, mostly at the Everett and Renton plants, but none of them report to a Washington address anymore.

The Boeing name still hangs over both towns, but the executives who make headquarters decisions now work three time zones away.

2. Washington’s Rain Reputation

Washington’s biggest city, Seattle, averages 39.34 inches of rain a year under the National Weather Service’s latest 30-year climate normal.

Many residents peg that number as one of the highest in the country.

Atlanta gets almost 50 inches in a typical year, and so does New York City, both comfortably ahead of Seattle’s total.

Way off.

Seattle earns its reputation from frequency, not volume.

Light rain shows up often, even when the yearly total stays modest, and many residents skip an umbrella since a hood handles it fine.

3. Mount Rainier’s ‘Sleeping’ Volcano

Washington’s tallest peak, Mount Rainier, reads like scenery to many residents, not the volcano it is.

That’s a mistake.

The U.S. Geological Survey and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network watch Mount Rainier around the clock with seismometers, GPS stations, and infrasound sensors.

USGS and its partner agencies have been expanding that network toward more than 40 real-time stations, watching for earthquakes and the volcanic mudflows called lahars.

They rank it a Very High Threat volcano nationwide.

It’s at rest between eruptions, not extinct, and its most recent confirmed eruptive activity dates to roughly 1,000 years ago, not the 1800s many residents assume.

USGS traces that 1800s story to unconfirmed 1894 newspaper reports and to pumice once blamed on an 1820s eruption that turned out to be far older material, redeposited from a 2,200-year-old layer.

Towns like Orting and Puyallup sit on old mudflow paths from the mountain, which is exactly why the monitoring network matters so much to the people living downstream.

4. Seattle’s ‘Original’ Starbucks

Washington claims the original Starbucks.

That part is true.

However, the storefront tourists photograph at Pike Place Market isn’t quite it.

Starbucks opened its first store on March 30, 1971, in a rented corner storefront at 2000 Western Avenue, several blocks from where the crowds gather today, according to HistoryLink, Washington’s state history nonprofit.

That building faced demolition in 1976, so the founders moved the shop half a block south to 1912 Pike Place, where it still draws crowds convinced they’re standing in the company’s birthplace.

Seattle still deserves credit for starting the coffee chain.

The storefront tourists photograph today is just the second location, not the first.

5. Washington’s New ‘Income Tax’

Residents who never expected to owe a dime mistake Washington’s 2021 capital gains law for a full income tax.

It isn’t an income tax.

Washington’s 2021 law only reaches profits over $250,000 a year from selling stocks, bonds, or a business.

The Washington Supreme Court upheld it as a lawful excise tax, not an income tax, in a 2023 ruling.

Fewer than 9,050 tax returns statewide triggered it in 2025, according to the state’s own count, and gains above $1 million now face a second tier taxed at 9.9%.

Wages, real estate sales, and retirement accounts stay untouched, so Washington still taxes a typical paycheck exactly the same as it always has: Not at all.

6. Sales Tax at the Grocery Store

Washington runs the third-highest combined state and local sales tax rate in the country, averaging 9.57%.

So, residents assume the state taxes everything at checkout.

That’s not the case with many food items.

State law exempts many grocery items, unprepared food like bread, produce, meat, and dairy, from sales tax entirely, according to the Department of Revenue.

Prepared meals, soda, and alcohol don’t get the same break.

So, a rotisserie chicken from the deli counter rings up taxed while the same raw chicken in the meat case doesn’t.

7. Washington’s Desert Half

Many west-side residents picture Washington as one giant rainforest, but the state splits into two different worlds at the Cascade Range.

Half of it stays dry.

Cities on the eastern side, like the Tri-Cities near the Snake and Columbia Rivers, average as little as seven inches of rain a year, closer to a desert climate than to Seattle’s.

The Cascades trap much of the Pacific moisture on their western slopes before it ever reaches the Palouse, the Yakima Valley, or Spokane on the other side.

Farmers out there irrigate wheat and wine grapes instead of fighting mud, a detail many west-side residents forget their own state grows.

8. Washington’s Marijuana ‘First’

Washington gets credit as the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, and residents repeat that claim more than almost any other.

Colorado shares that title.

Voters in Washington and Colorado passed legalization on the same night in November 2012.

But Colorado’s retail shops opened first, on January 1, 2014, months before Washington’s doors opened that July.

Washington’s rollout took longer because the state built a stricter licensing and lab-testing system before letting a single shop sell a gram.

9. Puget Sound’s Orca Numbers

Washington’s identity leans hard on its killer whales, and residents talk about the population like it’s holding steady.

It isn’t.

Southern Resident killer whales that swim through Puget Sound have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act since 2005.

The most recent census, taken in July 2025, counted just 74 whales across the J, K, and L pods, far below the mid-1990s peak of nearly 100.

Chinook salmon, the orcas’ main food source, keeps getting harder for them to find, and that shortage is the biggest reason the count keeps sliding instead of recovering.