Howard Schultz
speaker
633 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Howard Schultz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And so you can do things like become the official coffee of United Airlines or be in Costco's all over the US. You did this a number of times. And I feel like the rest of the world did not catch on to what you were doing, was just finding little billboards everywhere where you could put the Starbucks logo and sort of create that ubiquity.
Yeah. If you thought the Costco revolt was high, you can imagine.
when i said we have an opportunity for united airlines people thought that was absolutely blasphemy don't do that and again the exposure and the opportunity to surprise and delight customers in places that they've never had anything close to good coffee all these things when you consider we didn't spend a dollar a dollar of marketing dollars ever
And so the reputation of the company was built basically word of mouth, both inside our stores and exactly right in places that we could surprise the customer. And then we also started putting Starbucks coffee in grocery stores. which was the other thing. Because remember, we were building a beverage business.
And we were then going back to our core business in new channels of distribution. It's like the ultimate goal is to capture those margin dollars from selling cups of coffees in the stores that you operate. But there's all these other things that you can do that actually might spit off some profit dollars.
But at the very least, it's a break-even way to do customer acquisition and brand building in the rest of the world. I don't know what our cost of customer acquisition was back then.
But it was low.
But you weren't spending any money on marketing. But United Airlines was paying you for coffee, I assume. I don't know exactly how that went down. I have to assume that Barnes & Noble was basically the same thing.
Barnes & Noble was a different deal. I met Len Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble, very interesting guy, very smart guy, great merchant. And we just started talking. He was from Brooklyn. I was from Brooklyn. We had a natural kind of relationship. And I said, what do you think about us opening Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble, given you are the ultimate third place is what we are?
And it just, again, became a natural extension of our stores.
Yeah. Did not know that.
And I still am friendly with Jim Sinegal today. I mean, your companies rhyme in so many ways. That's not surprising at all. I want to talk a little bit, before we get to the IPO here, about what the strategy was when you expanded market by market. Did you try to sprinkle a few stores in and see? Did you try to move into a market with force and be the dominant coffeehouse chain in that city?
And in particular, it could be worth talking about Boston.
Well, Boston's an anomaly because of the acquisition. But Bihar was so strident in not expanding to multiple markets at once. And he was 100% right. And so we went to Chicago. Went to LA. And we stayed there for quite a while. Went to Portland. We weren't ready for New York City in terms of the issues there. But we were very diligent. You went to DC first before New York City.
We were not expanding to multiple markets until we had enough evidence in the existing market that we had success. And we weren't going to compound the growth in another market with problems that we're having in the existing one. And I think that's all be-her.
he was he was managing all the operations boston was very different we had a very strong high quality competitor called the coffee connection in boston with a owner operator in george howell who was not unlike alfred pete kind of a gospel of coffee culture on the east coast And we knew Boston was going to be tough for Starbucks to enter. We also had Dunkin' Donuts there.
Like a lot of the good real estate was taken by the coffee connection, right?
Yeah.
And so George and I never saw eye to eye. But it was clear that if we came to Boston in a significant way, we were going to impact his business. And I think to his credit, he was willing to sell. So Coffee Connection was the first acquisition. And we had to tread very lightly after the acquisition because of the loyalty and be careful with the name and solicit George's help and advice.
And also, we needed him to kind of validate for us what we were trying to do.
Showing 221–240 of 633 · page 12 of 32
← Previous
Next →