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Anyone?
Think back. To before the planet groaned with 17,000 Starbucks shops. Before the pumpkin spice lattes and the Ciao Amore CDs. Before the Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino ice cream, the Starbucks cream liqueur, the Pinkberry-inspired Sorbetto.
In short, to before Howard D. Schultz and his trenta-size ambition turned a few coffeehouses here into the vast corporate Empire of the Bean.
The world has often seemed three espressos behind Mr. Schultz — which is why the low-key guy sitting in his office here doesn’t quite seem like Howard Schultz.
Did he just say “but”? As in, “We have won in many ways, but ...”? Was that a “we” instead of an “I”? A note of humility?
Yes, this is Howard Schultz: the man who willed Starbucks onto so many street corners — and then, for a moment, looked as if he might lose it all.
Not even Mr. Schultz could have predicted how Starbucks would change our culture when its first shop opened here, in Pike Place Market, on March 30, 1971. Like it or not, Starbucks became, for many of us, what we talk about when we talk about coffee. It changed how we drink it (on a sofa, with Wi-Fi, or on the subway), how we order it (“for here, grande, two-pump vanilla, skinny extra hot latte”) and what we are willing to pay for it ($4.30 for the aforementioned in Manhattan).
But during the depths of the recession, Starbucks nearly drowned in its caramel macchiato. After decades of breakneck expansion under Mr. Schultz, tight-fisted consumers abandoned it. The company’s sales and share price sank so low that insiders worried Starbucks might become a takeover target.
So, after an eight-year hiatus, an alarmed Mr. Schultz returned as chief executive in January 2008. He shut 900 shops, mostly in the United States, drastically cut costs and put the company back on course.
Friends and colleagues say this hellish experience left Mr. Schultz a changed man. Starbucks, these people say, is no longer “The Howard Schultz Show.” The adjective that many use to characterize his new self is “humble” — a word that few would have applied to him before.
“Everything Starbucks did in the past, more or less, had worked,” Mr. Schultz said in an interview in January at the company’s headquarters, with a view of Puget Sound south of downtown Seattle. “Every store we opened was successful, every city, every country.”
He continued: “Growth had a life of its own — and that’s O.K., when you’re hitting the cover off the ball every time, but at some point, nothing lasts forever.”
One thing hasn’t changed: the man dreams big. In that same interview, Mr. Schultz spoke of expanding into still more products and in markets like China. He is pushing, of all things, a brand of instant coffee. The words “Starbucks Coffee” were just removed from the company’s green mermaid logo because he wants to waltz his brand up and down the grocery aisles. On Thursday, he announced that the company had struck a deal with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to distribute Starbucks coffee and teas for Keurig single-serving systems. Shares of Starbucks jumped nearly 10 percent on the news, reaching their highest level since 2006. The stock closed at $36.56 on Friday.
Mr. Schultz and his colleagues say Starbucks will keep its feet on the ground this time, but some outsiders have doubts. Detractors say Starbucks long ago ceded its role as a gourmet tastemaker to become a “billions-and-billions served” chain like McDonald’s. Starbucks — “Charbucks,” to those who complain that its heavily roasted coffee tastes burned — will never rekindle the old romance, these people say.
“Has anybody said they came back because people love the coffee again?” asks Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.”
“They came back because they’re remaking themselves as a brand that competes on value, largely — a brand that’s everywhere, easily accessible, predictable,” Mr. Simon says.
HOWARD SCHULTZ, now 57, is a tall, sinewy man with a toothy grin and a silky sales pitch. He rarely sticks to script, preferring to speak off the cuff, whatever his audience. In conversations, he leans in, locks eyes and gives the impression that, right now, there is no one else in the world he would rather be talking to. When he speaks of “soul” and “authenticity” and “love,” you could almost forget that he runs a multibillion-dollar business that has become an uneasy symbol of globalization. Or that the British actor Rupert Everett once likened Starbucks to a metastasizing cancer.
The story of Mr. Schultz’s life and career has been told many times, not least by Mr. Schultz. (His second book, “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul,” is to be published on March 29.) But some highlights bear repeating:
He grew up poor in the Bay View housing projects in Canarsie, Brooklyn, received a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University and, after a variety of jobs, joined the fledging Starbucks in 1982, as head of marketing. Inspired by Italy’s coffee culture, he left Starbucks and opened his own coffee shop. Then, in 1987, he bought Starbucks, which at the time had all of six shops. By 1995, Starbucks had 677 shops. By 2000, it had 3,501, and that year Mr. Schultz stepped aside as C.E.O.
And so it went for Starbucks, one success after another, until the recession hit and exposed the company’s overreach to the world.
In December 2007, Mr. Schultz was worried that the Starbucks brand was losing its luster, and he and the board decided that in the new year, they would push aside Jim Donald and announce that Mr. Schultz would return as C.E.O. That month, Mr. Schultz, his wife, Sheri, and their two children flew to Hawaii for their annual getaway.
But on the beach in Kona, he just couldn’t relax. He kept checking the company’s daily sales figures and was horrified to see that they were falling by double digits.
Also in Hawaii then was his friend Michael Dell, who had recently returned to run Dell Inc. On a long bicycle ride along the coast, Mr. Dell told Mr. Schultz that when he returned to Dell, he wrote what he called a “transformational agenda.” Mr. Schultz then created his own plan for Starbucks.
His goals were to fix troubled stores, to rekindle an emotional attachment with customers and to make longer-term changes like reorganizing executives and revamping the supply chain.