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
Like when I go to an airport or a city and there's not an easy way to get to a store, I'm like, what? What is this place? What backwoods place am I in? Like it's expected. And when you live with something, you know, most of your life, you forget that it was once a crazy idea.
What's the stat that you have on, I've heard you say it a number of times, on employee tenure at Starbucks versus others in the category? It's a 2x is what I believe. That employee tenure is 2x longer or turnover is half of what it is industry-wide? It makes a huge difference.
And you've talked about Beanstalk. You've talked about comprehensive health insurance. When I think about the most important thing we probably have done in the last 20 years, it's been the unique relationship that we established with Arizona State University and its president, Michael Crowe.
Could we create free college tuition, a four-year free college tuition through Arizona State for every single partner at Starbucks? And we did it. And thousands of Starbucks partners are engaged and going to school, and thousands have graduated.
The College Achievement Plan demonstrates going back to the early years of the speeches I was giving about what is the responsibility for a for-profit company in the world we're living in. And it's not just to make money.
Here's one that we haven't talked as much about. You were part of this secular trend of gourmet coffee. And I'm curious if you view that to be a true statement, or if you're saying, no, we created this entire wave. It wasn't going to happen.
Yeah, that's a lot of people who have gone on to do other things after. And I think one thing that's always been missed is that Starbucks has always been a great first job.
So in your mind then, let's say there's a parallel universe where Howard Schultz doesn't exist. The year is 1995. Is there a... nationwide chain not called Starbucks with gourmet coffee taking off in the United States because the conditions were perfect for it?
I would assume that there would have been a national franchised business that would have occupied the coffee space but would have been more commoditized.
Yeah, I don't think anything would have been executed like Starbucks. But I think someone would have showed up. The opportunity was just too much white space.
There was clearly demand there. We were coming off this horrible Folgers and Maxwell House era, and there was this growing demand. But that doesn't mean that a company like Starbucks would have been created. It means just in some way that consumer demand would have been satisfied. Yeah.
But just remember, our intent was not to build a global business. You know, the first business plan, and I've said this many times, when I was raising money, it was 100 stores. And I wasn't raising the money, and I couldn't afford to reprint the whole document, whatever that was at the time. And I whited out. No one even knew what that means.
Wow. When was the last time you used a whiteout?
Yeah. It's been a while. It's been a while. Wait, really? Yeah, I whited it out at 75 because I couldn't. Did it feel too ambitious?
Yeah, people didn't believe. Think you're crazy. But we never, you know, Japan was the turning point of thinking we could build an international business. But none of us had any international experience. No one in the entire company. I mean, in many ways, you could say this shouldn't have happened.
Okay, so this brings us to the absolute magic of founder-led businesses. I mean, when you have a founder at the helm, you get all this leeway from shareholders, from employees. You can take crazy risks. And people know it's because you're you. But for you, it wouldn't exist at all. So run with it. What are the biggest innovations that have happened at Starbucks not under Howard Schultz?
What a question. I'm pausing, not because there hasn't been any, because I'm sure there has been, but I'm hard-pressed to kind of think about what it was.
I don't think you were running the show when the pumpkin spice latte came out. Yes, I was. You were?
Yeah, yes, I was. I didn't like it.
Yeah. It does feel like you were obsessed with the purity of the Italian coffee bar for a long time. And then at some point you were like, actually, what I'm obsessed with is serving customers in whatever they want from us.
Showing 561–580 of 633 · page 29 of 32
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