“What are you talking about?” the Realtor said. “What about the restaurant across the street?” he asked.
One day, while talking to his real estate agent about options for locations nearby, Schultz revealed the proposal. But as unwelcome as this information was, it gave Schultz an excuse to try an idea he’d been mulling over privately for quite a while - something that, as far as anyone could remember, had never been attempted before something any sensible businessman would have called outright crazy. In 1989 alone, Starbucks had lost $1.2 million it couldn’t afford to lose much more. For a company still struggling to break even selling coffee drinks that many considered as faddish as fondue or fanny packs, this was distressing news. And to make matters worse, Schultz learned that the landlord of his Robson Street store was planning to close down and gut the building within a few years, which would leave Starbucks without its main cash cow for as long as it took to complete renovations. For years, he had been pressing his Vancouver Realtor to find another space in the neighborhood, but nothing suitable turned up. So Schultz was not one to take lost customers lightly. When he acquired Starbucks in 1987, the company’s store count stood at eleven barely three years later, he had increased its size nearly eightfold, to eighty-five cafés. Projects, Schultz had been racing to snare customers and expand his chain since the day he bought it. A young and ambitious former housewares salesman who grew up broke in Brooklyn’s housing The café was so busy, its lines so endless, that the store’s employees were certain they were turning away hundreds of potential customers every day. In an age when concoctions like the latte still seemed exotic and obscure, this tiny Starbucks served ten thousand people each week - and those were just the ones who could get in. Yet the store was a living testament to the world’s sudden, intense, and puzzling thirst for expensive coffee drinks. Aesthetically speaking, this coffeehouse was unimpressive it occupied a dilapidated, musty old space, and it had next to no room for patrons to sit down. In early 1991, just a few years after he had scraped together the money to buy a fledgling Seattle coffee company called Starbucks, Schultz’s most profitable café sat on a bustling intersection in the chic Robson Street shopping district of Vancouver, British Columbia. Part two: getting steamed chapter 5: Storm Brewing 141 chapter 6: A Fair Trade? 169 chapter 7: What’s in Your Cup 199 chapter 8: Green-Apron Army 226 chapter 9: The Seattle Colonies 246 epilogue: The Last Drop 268 Acknowledgments 272 Notes 275 Index 290Įpending on your ideological tilt - and, really, on how much you like coffee - it was either an assault on decency itself or the most brilliant decision Howard Schultz ever made. Part one: the rise of the mermaid chapter 1: Life Before Lattes 17 chapter 2: A Caffeinated Craze 47 chapter 3: The Siren’s Song 86 chapter 4: Leviathan 111 International business enterprises-United States-Case studies. Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group USA 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit our Web site at First eBook Edition: November 2007 ISBN: 3-1 1. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. To Gina, my little sis, a great lover of coffee - even if she drowns it in vanilla syrupĬopyright © 2007 by Taylor Clark All rights reserved. Taylor Clark li t t l e, brow n a n d com pa n y New York Boston London
Starbucked a double tall tale of caffeine, commerce, and culture