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
I want to pick up the thread on China now that we're sort of into the 2010s. Okay. This decade saw huge, ridiculous growth in China store openings. So there were 500 stores in 2011, right, when you're sort of coming out of that, the rut. By 2017, there were 3,000. Today, there's almost 7,000. And there was a stat that was reported that a new store opened in China every 15 hours in 2017. True.
Now bring us to that seed that you planted earlier with Belinda being the single most important employee.
China presented the enormity of opportunity with the significant challenge of pioneering. It's a tea-drinking culture. Tea-drinking culture, no morning business, people eating rice in the morning. We got real estate wrong. We got breakfast wrong. But it was all coming from the control of Seattle.
Yeah, it was exactly what you see right now. There's no different. But they didn't know. The Chinese people hardly knew what coffee was. There was no morning traffic. And in the early days of our partner, we didn't see eye to eye, so we got them out. When Belinda came along, we had a world-class operator who had succeeded in Singapore and Hong Kong. She's a strong person who believed that Seattle
the way we were organized was not a formula for success. You can't have people in Starbucks in Seattle designing the breakfast menu who have never been to China, who think they're going to eat blueberry muffins. And so when she said to me, I will do it if I'm in control of everything. So I want to decentralize China. I report to you, it's you and me,
And John Culver, who runs International, takes Seattle out of the equation. We were failing. What choice did I have? She turned it. She single-handedly built the China business.
Today, 18% of Starbucks' revenue is China. Yeah.
She deserves all the credit. John and I have been to China almost every quarter during the building years of turning it with her. And all the government meetings to tell the Starbucks story. And then we did things in China disruptively.
Well, Belinda decided that she could go to the government and go to an insurance company and come back to Starbucks and get government approval for Starbucks to do something that had never been done before and provide health insurance to the parents and grandparents of our partners. Cool.
The Chinese government was so intrigued, sitting down with them saying, can you explain why do you want to do this?
Right. You don't have to.
Right.
Yeah.
Because it's the culture of our company. We want to do everything we can to benefit our people. Humanity. And it's universal. But it's so, I think, important to just create some guardrails. So one day in the early stages of Starbucks, Howard Beer comes to my office one day. Remember, we're small at this stage. And he says, we got a terrible situation. I said, what?
The manager of the Seattle Trust store on 2nd and Madison, Seattle, Tom Kerrigan, has AIDS. Now, AIDS at that time was like leprosy. Leprosy. So Tom comes in and he says, I need to resign from Starbucks. And he's crying. Do you have any health insurance? No. No. And so we covered Tom Kerrigan from that point on. But it was those kinds of imprinting moments. And there were many like that.
Right. I think it's funny. So I have heard that story probably five times, because I've consumed an incredible amount of Starbucks content over the last couple months. And I've heard a story about Starbucks employees wanting to buy a cow for a farmer in Africa. And
stories about Flint, Michigan, and stories about the initiative to bring the company together to try to bring the country together when the government was shut down in 2013, whenever that was. And I was getting frustrated watching all these stories because I kept thinking... This is not the answer to why Starbucks worked.
These are these one off anecdotes that are sure they're emblematic of some broader theme. But at the end of the day, like the answer to why Starbucks works has to be something about the business model. And every time you walk into the store, X, Y, Z happens. And here's the economics. But it turns out there are thousands of these stories and it's the humanity seeping through.
And it's hard for the company to tell the story because everyone just feels like a random one-off example, but they're happening in every community in every part of the country.
And I think that is the, for me as like a business historian, that's been the thing that jumps out is there's no other company that we've studied that has this sort of obsession with people and humanity the way that Starbucks does. Yeah.
Showing 441–460 of 633 · page 23 of 32
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