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
It's a hard work. It has to be a good number because there's, I don't know if it's, I haven't done the math, billions, trillions of combinations of possible drinks. And so it has to be every single day as a barista, you're making something for the first time.
Yes. I think the number that people use inside the company is 100,000 different variations of beverages that are being made consistently. 100,000 different beverages.
Well, not only that, but every food company, every retail food business from McDonald's on took a page out of Starbucks, went to school on us, put espresso machines in their stores and started doing coffee beverages. Right. That also expanded the market.
Yes. Coffee, so here's my second one in addition to the, it's addictive but delightful. It is perceived to be virtuous to be a barista, where it is not perceived to be virtuous to flip burgers. And I don't know if that's something Starbucks created. I don't know if that's something inherent to the product. I don't know if that's because it has this Italian lineage.
But there's all these incredible benefits that Starbucks and any other coffeehouse chains get to enjoy because it's respected to do that work. And I'm curious, why do you think that's respected when similar ways of spending your hours in restaurant work isn't?
First of all, I've never heard it quite like that. And I think that's a very interesting insight. There is craft and art to the expression of making the beverage. I also think the intimacy of the relationship with the customer is so different. And baristas know the names of their customers. They know their dog's name.
We have a drive-thru, and I saw a video where the barista knows the name of the dog and knows it. The whole thing is just like a magical dance that happens when the cars pull in, and all of a sudden, it's not a transaction. One of the beauties that we have been able to do is elevate the experience at the drive-thru, not all the time.
So I think your question is steeped in one is a commoditized environment and the other clearly is not. And the challenge for Starbucks is continuing to innovate for the barista.
And when you, in this category, to extend that point, you start from a place of, this is a good job. And you can sort of improve the experience for that employee so they can improve the experience for your customers. Whereas in other things that are commoditized, they start from a position of, I have to do this job.
And it's a really tough uphill battle to invest in your people, whereas Starbucks kind of has a tailwind.
But it is a hard job. Certainly. And we have to honor the people who are doing it more so today than ever before.
Yep. Another one that I have is, it's funny, it flies in the face of some of the pitfalls of ubiquity that we were discussing before. The fact that it is everywhere almost cheapens the experience. To me, Starbucks' ubiquity is a massive feature. The fact that I can go anywhere in the world and get basically my same order, or certainly anywhere in America and get my same order.
I can even do it from the mobile app in a way that I'm very familiar with ordering. It's reliable, it's predictable. It's the same reason I bank with Chase and I buy Apple products. It's this thing that I just know works everywhere and I never have to take any risk on. And Starbucks didn't have that when it was starting, but it really feels like
It's reached this scale that no one else can really compete with the level of ubiquity.
So ubiquity, earlier on in our conversation, I said ubiquity is an enemy of Starbucks. And it's an enemy because we can't be defined by our ubiquity. We have to be defined by the one store you come into, not based on the thousands, but that experience you have in the store. So if the ubiquity is driving trust
and driving convenience, we have to ensure the fact that we are providing that intimacy in the store and not allowing ubiquity to commoditize the experience. That is the framework of the daily challenge of the company.
Frustratingly, for those of us who are trying to analytically put this puzzle together, the humanity is actually the answer. Scaling humanity is actually the answer. You know, along with this obsessive quality of product, the fact that product isn't just product, but experience is the product. It's everything you experience around consuming the beverage itself.
It's a bunch of the things we've already talked about. You invest in your employees. They take care of the customers. Who takes care of the shareholders? But the shareholders are last. It's the fact that, oh yeah, we talked about the store cash flow dynamics that you can scale in a really cash efficient way when you're paying the stores back in less than two years every time.
Every store is a billboard. So you're intentionally picking real estate in these places where you're building familiarity with people. They're walking by over and over and over. You're extending the brand by doing United Airlines, by going to grocery stores. Everything is a billboard. Everything is a billboard. Why pay for customer acquisition when you can get product in people's hands?
The third place, very novel idea at first. Turned out that was something basically the entire country and then the world wanted to participate in. Not obvious at first. And it's so easy to think about these things that now we take completely for granted. Like Starbucks is infrastructure in our society. It is assumed.
Showing 541–560 of 633 · page 28 of 32
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