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.
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Appearances
And what are the headwinds?
Headwinds were the level of attrition of customers.
And we weren't as good as we were when we were small.
And this goes back to what I said earlier. Growth covers up mistakes. And success breeds hubris. And it did.
How could it not? I mean, how could you... Starbucks today is so freaking ubiquitous, which again is one of the things I love about it. It's consistent anywhere I travel in the world. I can count on it. I can mobile order and pay. There's all these wonderful things. But when you become like government level scale in the world, people assume it's a piece of public infrastructure.
I assume employees even must feel that way during some periods of time of like, we're so big, we're just... But the worst thing that Starbucks could have become...
And the worst thing that Starbucks could become is a utility. Scale and ubiquity creates complexity. Complexity demands efficiency. But we are in a business where that touch point between the customer and the barista has to be protected and has to be elevated. Now, then you get stores that are so busy where the barista can't even look up, can't look up.
And then you get mobile order and pay, which we haven't even talked about.
Which is a thing I love and do every day and depersonalizes the experience by definition.
Yes. Starbucks demands nurturance. It's a company that has to be nurtured like a young child. That is an anomaly, inconsistent with scale. And you get people coming into the company with different experience, different language. The immersion doesn't quite hit them in the heart or the soul or the conscience of the company.
They feel like they're doing a good job, but it's not the job that's consistent with the integrity and heritage of what the company has been. Metaphorically, let's say that's a giant reservoir. If you're taking a deposit on a consistent basis out of the reservoir and it's getting dry, you better stop. You better make sure you're making a deposit so they're equal and it's balanced.
When you get this, that's when the company loses the plot. And if you get this and you're making a lot of money and the stock price is high, people say, it's okay, we're fine. And that's fool's gold. It's a camouflage because eventually it's going to bite you in the ass.
Have you ever figured out a way to measure these things in a way that as long as these numbers, that the numbers are a direct tie to our values are good, we can actually put a KPI against them, we know that the core is solid.
I haven't been smart enough to figure that out. But I mean, I think the interesting thing to me today is that the Asian business is operating at a much higher level of the soft side of Starbucks than we are in the US.
Now I understand your Belinda Wong comment.
That doesn't answer your question about quantifying it. But when I am in Asia, I see things that are very elevated to the brand that speak to the financial performance of those markets, which are very high.
Okay, before we get to today, I want to talk about some other things that happened in 2008. 2008 was a big year. So 2008, 2009, 2010, there's no way to put it other than a wildly successful turnaround. Your low point in 2008 profits were 315 million, and by 2010, they were 945 million. I mean... I don't know how we did that. Well, we just went through a lot of the ways of how you did that.
There's a couple other things here, one of which is technology, but I'm told there's a story you have about Steve Jobs around this point in time, too.
Yeah, it's a funny story, another story. And so... In Hawaii, when I was on vacation, I'm talking to Michael Dell and Benioff. And you're cycling with Michael Dell. Yeah, I'm cycling with Dell almost every day. And I'm talking to Benioff. Michael introduced me to Benioff, didn't know him. And so his- It's a pretty good Hawaii crew.
So I get back and Adam Brotman, who's a key person in all this, in terms of mobile order and pay. Yeah.
Showing 361–380 of 633 · page 19 of 32
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