Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz, born in Brooklyn on July 19, 1953, served as Starbucks chairman and chief executive across three distinct eras, from 1986 to 2000, from 2008 to 2017, and as interim chief executive from 2022 to 2023. He joined the original Starbucks Coffee Company in 1982 as director of retail operations and marketing, left to found Il Giornale, and merged that espresso-bar venture back into Starbucks in the late 1980s. Under his leadership the company built a store network that reshaped coffee culture in Seattle, across the United States, and internationally, while large-scale distribution deals made it the largest coffeehouse chain in the world. He took Starbucks public in 1992 at a 271 million dollar valuation and used the proceeds to double the store count, stepped aside for Orin Smith in 2000, then returned during the 2008 financial crisis to dismiss executives, close hundreds of stores, and rebuild the brand. The rapid expansion under Schultz earned him comparison to Ray Kroc, the franchise architect of McDonald's.

Starbucks opened in Seattle on March 30, 1971, founded by business partners Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker, who had met as students at the University of San Francisco and were inspired by roasting entrepreneur Alfred Peet to sell high-quality coffee beans and equipment. For its first decade the business operated as a local coffee bean retailer, with no drinks sold at all. The first store stood at 2000 Western Avenue until 1976, when it moved to 1912 Pike Place, the location that became the brand's shrine. In the first two years the founders bought green coffee beans from Peet's, until Peet stopped supplying them in 1973 and helped train their new roastmaster, Jim Reynolds. Even the name carried the founders' idiosyncratic logic, emerging from a list of words beginning with st and a misreading of a Cascade Range mining town before landing on Starbuck, the chief mate in Moby-Dick.

The unionization campaign that defines Starbucks' current labor era began at a single store in Buffalo, New York, and grew into the largest retail organizing drive of its generation. By mid-2026, more than fifteen thousand workers at 706 United States stores had voted to unionize with Workers United, and the union and company had been negotiating toward a national collective bargaining framework since February 2024. The pressure has expressed itself in strikes as well as elections: the longest strike lasted sixty-four days in Brookline, Massachusetts, and ended with the store's workers unionizing, while the largest single action came on March 22, 2023, when 117 union locations staged a one-day strike framed as outlasting interim chief executive Howard Schultz, who had resigned ahead of his Senate testimony. Smaller union footholds exist elsewhere, including about a third of the Chilean workforce, hundreds of workers in New Zealand, and eight stores in Canada.

Schultz grew up in Brooklyn's Canarsie public housing projects, the son of Fred Schultz, a truck driver, and Elaine, a receptionist. He has described the family as poor, though childhood contemporaries recalled a middle-class upbringing, with one calling the development the country club of housing projects. After school he spent his time at the Boys Club of New York, an organization he remained connected to as an alumnus. He graduated from Canarsie High School in 1971 and enrolled at Northern Michigan University, where he joined the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity and earned a communications degree in 1975. He had played football hoping for an athletic scholarship, but an injury ended that path and left him to finance his education another way. The distance between his family's economic fragility and the ambition he carried out of Canarsie became a recurring thread in how he later framed Starbucks' employee benefits and ownership programs for hourly workers.

Starbucks' labor conflict did not begin in Buffalo. Warehouse and roasting plant workers in Seattle became the company's first unionized employees in March 1985, voting to join UFCW Local 1001 in a unit of roughly 120 people, and their 1986 contract brought health care coverage, paid vacation, and sick leave to part-time workers in Seattle and its suburbs. When Schultz became company president in 1987, the unit's history took a contested turn: he sought to expand the bargaining unit to include store workers, a dilution tactic that backfired when the store workers voted the union in, and he proposed reductions in medical benefits, work hours, and just-cause protections established in the prior contract. A decertification petition backed by store employee Daryl Moore succeeded in late 1987, and the plant union was decertified in 1992. Schultz wrote that the company had no involvement in the filing, while local union leaders said management had made it and hired anti-union consultants and lawyers.

The transformation from retailer to café happened in stages through the 1980s. In 1984 the original owners, led by Jerry Baldwin, purchased Peet's Coffee, tying their identity ever closer to the Bay Area roasting tradition. By 1986 the company operated six Seattle stores and had begun selling espresso coffee. In 1987 the ownership group sold the chain to Howard Schultz, their former marketing director, who put his Il Giornale espresso bars under the Starbucks name and began expanding the company; that same year Starbucks opened its first locations outside Seattle, at Waterfront Station in Vancouver and in Chicago. Growth compounded quickly, and by 1989 there were forty-six stores across the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, with the company roasting more than two million pounds of coffee annually. The decade closed with the espresso-bar concept proven and the machinery of national expansion in place, positioned for the public markets that would arrive three years later.

At its June 1992 initial public offering, Starbucks counted 140 outlets and revenue of 73.5 million dollars, up from 1.3 million dollars in 1987, with a market value of 271 million dollars. The company sold roughly a twelve percent stake, raising around twenty-five million dollars, which financed a doubling of the store base over the following two years. Trading under the ticker SBUX, the newly public company used the capital and the currency of listed shares to professionalize its operations and fund an aggressive real estate program. The offering capped a five-year run in which Schultz had converted a six-store Seattle retailer into a company with the balance sheet and governance to pursue national scale. It also marked the moment Starbucks' employee stock options gained a public market price, converting the Bean Stock program from a symbolic grant into real, tradeable value for the partners who held it.

In December 2021, workers at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo voted to unionize, making it the only unionized shop among the chain's roughly nine thousand company-owned United States stores at the time. Two other Buffalo stores voted concurrently, one joining and one declining. The workers affiliated with Workers United, an arm of the Service Employees International Union, and organized around under-staffing and under-training, chronic issues the pandemic had exacerbated. The vote landed in an industry with a 1.2 percent unionization rate and was recognized as a symbolic victory for an American labor movement attempting to rebuild in sectors long written off as unorganizable. The campaign's creativity, barista-led committees, and social media documentation turned a single store election in one American city into a template that would be copied hundreds of times within eighteen months, forcing the company into a labor posture it had avoided for three decades.

Schultz began his career in 1976 as a Xerox salesman in New York, learning to sell in the punishing equipment market of the era. In 1979 the French private equity firm PAI Partners recruited him to serve as general manager of the American subsidiary of Hammarplast, a Swedish manufacturer of kitchenware and coffee-making equipment. Running Hammarplast's United States operations put him in the middle of the specialty coffee hardware business, and in 1981 he traveled to Seattle to fulfill an order of plastic cone filters placed by an unusual customer, a small coffee bean retailer called Starbucks. The visit exposed him to a company whose founders had built a devoted following around whole-bean arabica coffee, and it set in motion the recruitment that brought him west a year later. The Xerox and Hammarplast years gave Schultz the sales discipline and product grounding he would apply to coffee retail, and the filter order remains one of the great accidents in American business history.

The company's response to the Buffalo drive was immediate and intensive. Starbucks sent managers and executives, including its North America retail president, to Buffalo to engage employees on operational issues and work shifts alongside them, while workers were required to attend captive-audience meetings carrying anti-union messages. Some area stores were temporarily closed for remodeling, and one store preparing to vote was staffed heavily with new transfers, which workers said diluted union support while the company attributed it to pandemic sick-leave coverage. Starbucks asked that all twenty Buffalo-area stores vote simultaneously, which would have expanded the voting pool from 81 employees to about 450, a structure that generally works against unionization; the National Labor Relations Board ruled against the company twice, allowing store-by-store votes. Before the vote was scheduled, the company announced a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and raises for tenured workers, and it retained Littler Mendelson as its labor counsel.

In 1982, at twenty-nine, Schultz was hired at Starbucks as director of retail operations and marketing, joining owners Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker in a business built on whole-bean coffee, leaf teas, and spices. On a 1983 buying trip to Milan he encountered Italian espresso bar culture for the first time, and he returned convinced the company should serve traditional espresso beverages rather than only sell beans. Baldwin and Bowker allowed a pilot of the café concept, which succeeded, but they declined to roll it out, citing the high cost of espresso machines, the scarcity of American repair expertise, and customers' unfamiliarity with the drinks. The disagreement over whether Starbucks was a retailer of coffee or a place to consume it defined the break that followed. Schultz concluded that the espresso bar idea required a company of its own, and he began planning his exit from the business he had only just joined as an employee.

Growth after the IPO came through both new stores and portfolio moves. In 1994 Starbucks acquired The Coffee Connection and with it the rights to use, make, market, and sell the Frappuccino beverage, which it introduced under the Starbucks name in 1995 and which grew into a product line generating more than two billion dollars in annual sales by 2012. In 1999 the company experimented with full eateries in the San Francisco Bay Area under the Circadia brand and acquired Pasqua Coffee, a retail chain with almost sixty locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In April 2003 it bought Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia from AFC Enterprises for seventy-two million dollars, adding only 150 stores but, according to contemporaneous reporting, a more significant wholesale business. By June 2003 Starbucks Japan alone ran 466 stores with plans for dozens more, evidence of how the model was compounding internationally.

Organizing spread faster than any comparable retail campaign in decades. In November 2021, workers at three more Buffalo locations filed petitions; by early January 2022 the number of stores filing had grown past ten and extended beyond New York state; by the end of January more than fifty stores nationwide had petitioned. Mid-February brought more than seventy stores across twenty states, the end of February more than one hundred across twenty-five states, and mid-March more than one hundred fifty. The National Labor Relations Board certified the first union outside Buffalo on February 25, 2022, when a Mesa, Arizona store voted twenty-five to three, and on March 22 the first Seattle store voted unanimously to unionize. By May 27, 2022, one hundred stores had voted yes, and two hundred had organized by late July. Workers at challenged stores and the labor board alleged anti-union conduct influenced the losing votes, which the company denied.

The 2008 turnaround cut deeply into the store base. In July 2008, during the Great Recession, Starbucks announced it would close 600 underperforming company-owned stores and cut back United States expansion plans, and on July 29 it eliminated almost a thousand non-retail jobs, 550 of them layoffs. The same month it announced closure of 61 of its 84 Australian stores after misreading that country's café culture. In January 2009 the company announced 300 additional store closures and the elimination of seven thousand positions, with the board approving a reduction in Schultz's own salary. Altogether, from February 2008 to January 2009, Starbucks terminated an estimated 18,400 United States jobs and began closing 977 stores worldwide. The scale of the retrenchment signaled that the founder's return was a genuine restructuring rather than a symbolic restoration of the brand's romance, and it bought the balance sheet room to reinvest in stores and people.

Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to build the espresso-bar business its owners would not pursue. He calculated he needed four hundred thousand dollars to start, and to prepare he visited more than five hundred espresso bars in Milan, studying how the format worked as commerce and as theater. Fundraising was brutal: of the 242 investors he approached, 217 rejected the idea outright. Starbucks itself ultimately invested one hundred fifty thousand dollars in the new venture, with Baldwin taking a board seat and Bowker offering unofficial help, while a local doctor, Ron Margolis, contributed another hundred thousand. Schultz absorbed most of the personal risk of introducing espresso drinks to the American market. The rejection rate became part of the founding mythology he retold for decades, a standing reminder that the concept later valued in the tens of billions of dollars was, at inception, a proposition most professional investors declined to fund.

In March 2009, Starbucks introduced VIA Ready Brew, a line of instant coffee packets first unveiled in New York with testing in Seattle, Chicago, and London. The initial flavors, Italian Roast and Colombia, rolled out across the United States and Canada that October, supported by an in-store blind taste challenge in which many customers could not distinguish the instant product from freshly brewed coffee. The launch was a deliberate provocation inside a company that had built its identity on bean-to-cup craft, and financial analysts speculated that selling instant coffee under the same brand would devalue whatever premium positioning Starbucks had left. Schultz framed the product as extending the brand into occasions the stores could not reach, from travel to office pantries. The bet that a mass format could coexist with the café business tested the elasticity of the brand at the exact moment the turnaround was rebuilding its premium credentials, and VIA survived as a permanent presence on the shelf.

On March 29, 2023, Schultz testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where Bernie Sanders pressed him on an administrative law judge's finding that Starbucks had engaged in egregious and widespread misconduct in responding to the Buffalo organizing effort. Judge Michael Rosas had ordered the company to reinstate fired workers and required Schultz either to read employees a notice of their rights or be present at a meeting where the rights were read; Schultz said he would not comply, maintaining the company had not broken the law. Weeks later, on April 26, 2023, labor board prosecutors indicated corporate leadership had failed and refused to bargain with 144 unionized cafés, and the board had accumulated more than eighty claims of anti-union activity, including threats to close stores and terminations tied to organizing. In September 2023, an administrative law judge separately found the company violated labor law by announcing raises only for non-union employees.

Two years after Schultz's departure, the original Starbucks management team decided to concentrate on Peet's Coffee and Tea, the Bay Area roaster Baldwin had acquired, and sold the Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale for 3.8 million dollars. The 1987 purchase gave Schultz the name, the roasting operation, and six Seattle stores, which he folded into his espresso-bar company and rebranded under the Starbucks name. Expansion followed quickly across the United States, and the strategy drew a mixed reception: relations with independent coffeehouse chains were strained, while some owners credited Starbucks with educating American customers about coffee. The deal resolved the 1984 argument over the company's identity in Schultz's favor, converting a bean retailer into a beverage-led café chain. It remains one of the defining acquisitions of modern consumer retail, executed at a price that now looks vanishingly small against the global enterprise it ultimately produced.

Schultz did not believe in franchising, and he made a point of having Starbucks retain ownership of every domestic outlet, keeping store economics, operating standards, and culture inside the company rather than licensing them to third-party operators. That choice shaped the brand's consistency during national expansion and distinguished it from most fast-food growth models, even as it concentrated capital demands on the balance sheet. His positioning of Starbucks as a social hub between home and work is widely seen as introducing the second wave of coffee culture in the United States, with Seattle as its capital. The pace of store growth under his leadership led observers to describe him as the Ray Kroc of his generation, a founder-executive whose name became inseparable from a category he did not invent but industrialized. The refusal to franchise remains a structural legacy of his tenure, tested repeatedly but never reversed at scale in the domestic market.

Starbucks built its digital franchise in deliberate steps. In May 2008 it introduced a loyalty program for registered Starbucks Card users offering perks including free wireless internet, no charge for soy milk and flavored syrups, and free refills on brewed coffee, iced coffee, and tea. In 2009 it began beta testing a mobile app for the card, a stored-value system through which customers spent prepaid funds, and it released the complete mobile platform in January 2011. Adoption compounded quickly: by December 2011 mobile transactions exceeded twenty-six million, and by July 2013 more than ten percent of in-store purchases were made on customers' mobile devices. The decision to tie payments to a closed-loop card before near-field payment standards matured gave the company a behavioral dataset and prepaid float that most retailers lacked. What began as a gift card became the spine of the order-ahead and rewards ecosystem that now drives a large share of United States transactions.

Starbucks began drafting corporate social responsibility plans in 1994 and built its coffee sourcing program, C.A.F.E. Practices, in partnership with Conservation International, which helped design and audit it. The system rates suppliers on 249 indicators across economic accountability, social responsibility, and environmental leadership in coffee growing and processing, with farmers earning high overall scores receiving higher prices than lower scorers. Social responsibility indicators have hardened over time into zero-tolerance rules requiring that workers be paid in cash, check, or direct deposit, receive at least the established minimum wage, and work in places free of harassment, abuse, and discrimination, with no employment under fourteen years of age. The company has moved roughly ninety percent of its coffee purchases to preferred C.A.F.E.-certified providers and approaches its stated goal of one hundred percent ethically sourced coffee. Critics, including academics who studied its Chiapas operations, argue the program greenwashes the supply chain more than it transforms it.

On June 26, 1992, Starbucks completed its initial public offering and began trading under the ticker SBUX. The deal valued the company around 271 million dollars and raised capital that financed a doubling of the store count, funding the rollout that carried the brand from a regional Pacific Northwest retailer toward a national presence. The offering came amid a series of highly publicized coffee wars, as Starbucks' expansion put it into direct competition with entrenched players and independent cafés in city after city. Going public while the chain remained small gave Schultz the currency to professionalize management, build roasting and distribution infrastructure, and sustain the real estate pace that defined the decade. The IPO is the hinge between the entrepreneurial Starbucks of the Il Giornale era and the scaled consumer company that came to define specialty coffee worldwide, and it made the Bean Stock options granted to employees liquid and meaningful for the first time.

On June 1, 2000, Schultz stepped down as chief executive, moving into the chief global strategist role to drive international expansion, with Orin Smith, his chief financial officer through the 1990s, succeeding him. The transition was framed as an orderly succession rather than a retreat, and Schultz remained chairman. International work had already begun paying off: Schultz had coordinated the first Starbucks store opening in China in January 1999, and spent the following year helping develop a customer base for coffee in a tea-dominated market. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s he directed the company to plan one to two store openings per day in mainland China, a cadence that reflected conviction the market would eventually rank among the company's largest. The 2000 handoff tested whether the culture he built could run without his daily presence, a question the following decade would answer unevenly.

Fair trade became a measurable strand of the sourcing story in the 2000s. Starbucks introduced a fair trade product line in 2000, and of the roughly three hundred million pounds of coffee it purchased in 2006, about eighteen million pounds, or six percent, was certified. After a long-running dispute with Ethiopia, the company agreed to support and promote Ethiopian coffees and to acknowledge the country's ownership of designations like Harrar and Sidamo, a concession Ethiopia fought for to lift incomes for its impoverished farmers. In 2006 Starbucks said it paid 1.42 dollars per pound for its coffee, more than a third above the commodity price at the time, though the fully loaded retail equivalent, after transport, processing, rent, taxes, and labor, was 10.99 dollars per pound, a spread that kept the fairness debate alive. In 2022 the company stopped certifying its beans as Fairtrade in favor of its own verification programs, consolidating sourcing standards under its own audit.

On April 12, 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks after a manager claimed they were trespassing, an incident that began when they asked to use the restroom without making a purchase. Video of the arrests spread and protests followed. Chief executive Kevin Johnson apologized and the company declined to press charges, and on the April 26 earnings call Johnson reported the company had seen no sales drop, reiterating full-year guidance and beating consensus expectations with two percent same-store sales growth. He then announced that some eight thousand locations would close on May 29 for a seminar on racial bias intended to prevent a repeat of the Philadelphia episode. On June 19 the company said it would close 150 locations in 2019, three times its typical annual count, concentrated in urban areas already dense with stores. The episode forced a public audit of what the third place owes the public that uses it.

By the middle of the 2000s, the growth machine showed strain. Coffee wars with McDonald's and Dunkin' eroded Starbucks' market share as rivals improved their espresso offerings at lower prices, and the stock fell seventy-five percent between 2006 and 2008. Revenue was still growing, but the growth depended heavily on new store openings, an unsustainable and inorganic pattern that flattered the top line while same-store economics deteriorated. The company Schultz had handed to Jim Donald in 2005 was opening stores faster than the brand could defend them, diluting the experience that justified premium pricing. Congestion at the espresso bar, automated machines, and a broadening merchandising push all fed a creeping sense that the stores had lost their distinctiveness. The deterioration set the stage for Schultz's return, framed not as nostalgia but as an intervention to stop a company from consuming its own brand equity to feed unit growth.

On January 7, 2008, after an eight-year hiatus, Schultz returned as chief executive at the height of the financial crisis, succeeding Jim Donald. He led a mass dismissal of executives, closed hundreds of stores, and temporarily shut every United States location to retrain employees in making espresso, betting that a visible reset of craft would matter more than a quarter of lost sales. He redoubled the firm's fair trade and ethical sourcing policies across its supply chain in Africa and other coffee-producing regions, and within two years roughly doubled annual fair trade coffee purchases to an estimated forty million pounds. He arranged the appointment of the company's first chief technology officer, acknowledging that a retailer built on store experience now needed digital infrastructure. The program was more restructuring than turnaround theater, with costs, portfolio, sourcing, and leadership all rebuilt simultaneously while the consumer economy collapsed around the business.

The 2015 Race Together campaign pushed the company into one of its most criticized brand experiments. Baristas were instructed to write the phrase on customers' cups with the stated aim of sparking a national dialogue about race, and the initiative was heavily criticized and drew substantial backlash from customers and commentators who saw it as performative and poorly matched to a transaction that lasts seconds. The campaign sits in a longer pattern of racial-bias controversies the company has worked through publicly: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission raised allegations over promotion data from 2007 to 2011 suggesting minority retail partners received fewer promotions than statistically expected, and individual cafés have faced recurring criticism over incidents of racial bias, including the episode that led to closing eight thousand cafés for a day of training in 2018. Race Together remains the clearest case of the company's ambition to lead cultural conversation outrunning its operational credibility with the customers it serves.

In mid-2014 Schultz unveiled the College Achievement Plan, which teamed Starbucks with Arizona State University so that any employee working twenty or more hours weekly could qualify for free tuition through the university's online degree programs, extending the benefits philosophy of Bean Stock and part-time health coverage into higher education. The move positioned Starbucks as a career destination rather than a transitional employer and generated substantial brand dividends. It also burnished a compensation story that had grown unusual for a public company chief: reporting in 2018 indicated Schultz had taken a one-dollar annual salary in recent years, tying his personal economics to equity performance rather than cash pay. The tuition program, the options program, and the healthcare commitment together formed a coherent thesis he argued for decades, that investing in frontline workers ahead of what the market required was the cheapest durable competitive advantage available to a consumer brand.

Starbucks made its deepest structural bet on China. Schultz coordinated the first store opening there in January 1999 and spent the following year cultivating a customer base for coffee in a tea-drinking society, a market most consumer companies of the era treated as optional. Through the late 2000s and early 2010s he directed planning for one to two store openings per day in mainland China, a cadence sustained for years. The strategic commitment culminated in July 2017, when the company acquired the remaining fifty percent stake in its Chinese joint venture from long-term partners Uni-President Enterprises Corporation and President Chain Store Corporation for 1.3 billion dollars, taking full ownership of what had become its second-largest market. The buyout closed an era of partnership-driven entry and converted China into a wholly owned growth engine, with thousands of stores, localized formats, and delivery infrastructure built around digital ordering in the years that followed.

Schultz again stepped down as chief executive in December 2016, becoming executive chairman, and across the 2008 to 2017 span of his second tenure he oversaw nearly one hundred billion dollars added to Starbucks' market capitalization. From the eleven coffeehouses of 1987 the company reached twenty-eight thousand stores in seventy-seven countries by his retirement. On June 4, 2018, he announced he would leave active management after thirty-seven years, with Kevin Johnson, president and chief operating officer for the prior two years, becoming chief executive and Myron Ullman taking the chairmanship, as Schultz weighed a presidential campaign. He returned once more as interim chief executive in March 2022 after Johnson's retirement, handed off to Laxman Narasimhan in April 2023, and stepped down early on March 20, 2023, weeks before testifying before the Senate committee on health, education, labor, and pensions. Each departure tested the institution rather than the man.

On January 27, 2019, Schultz told 60 Minutes he was exploring a run for president as an independent centrist, having hired veteran political consultants Steve Schmidt and Bill Burton to assess the candidacy and reportedly prepared to spend three hundred to five hundred million dollars of his own fortune. The reaction from Democrats was hostile, with critics arguing a third-party candidacy would split the anti-Trump vote and re-elect the president. His first Seattle town hall drew protesters carrying signs reading venti mistake and grande ego, even as his speech itself was received respectfully. In February he said he would stay out of the race if Democrats nominated a centrist, and in May he delayed the decision. On September 6, 2019, he formally ruled out a run, concluding it was not the best way to serve the country at that time; the progression of Joe Biden toward the nomination, a politician ideologically closer to Schultz, shaped the exit, and he endorsed Biden in September 2020.

Schultz has written four books that mix memoir with corporate philosophy. Pour Your Heart Into It, written with Dori Jones Yang in 1997, tells the founding story through the Il Giornale merger and the benefits programs. Onward, published in 2011 with Joanne Gordon, recounts the 2008 turnaround and drew a divided reception: the Los Angeles Times called it self-flattering, Publishers Weekly found it personal, suspenseful, and surprisingly open, and Fast Company later ranked it among the books that best anticipated the future of workplace leadership, with sale proceeds donated to the Starbucks Foundation. For Love of Country, co-written with Rajiv Chandrasekaran in 2014, focused on veterans rather than business. From the Ground Up appeared in 2019, was read widely as a campaign book ahead of the election, reached the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists, and drew a politically charged reaction on Amazon, where negative reviews from Democratic voters left it rated below two stars.

When Starbucks first turned a profit in 1990, Schultz set out to do something he considered radical: distribute the company's newly won financial success among everyone responsible for creating it, from baristas up through store managers. A year later, in 1991, he introduced Bean Stock, a stock option plan that converted workers into partners with an ownership stake in the business. The first grant enrolled seven hundred people across roughly one hundred stores in the United States and Canada, and Starbucks became the first privately owned American company to offer a stock option program to all eligible employees, even part-timers. In an industry where hourly retail work carried no expectation of equity, the program redefined who a company's owners were. The company's own account stresses that the benefits ran in both directions, deepening pride, mutual support, and shared vision, and Bean Stock has remained a standing component of the benefits package through every subsequent restructuring and leadership change.

The company's own history of the split frames it as an experiment that worked too well. In 1984 Schultz, then director of operations and marketing, led Starbucks' first experiment with espresso, and the results were promising, but the founders did not want to distract from the business's primary goal of selling arabica coffee beans at retail. So in 1985 Schultz left and started Il Giornale, a company built on the ritual and romance he had observed in Milan's coffee bars. The break was not total: Starbucks became his first investor, and Il Giornale's coffee and espresso drinks were made from Starbucks beans, with chief coffee buyer Dave Olsen working with the new venture. By 1987 the concept had proven itself in the market, and the path back to the original brand opened when the founders decided to sell. The episode demonstrates how a corporate refusal to cannibalize a core business can hand the adjacent opportunity to someone else.

By March 1987, Schultz and Olsen had opened three Il Giornale locations when the decisive opportunity arrived: Starbucks' founders were ready to sell the company's name, its roasting plant, and its six Seattle stores. Schultz spent the spring raising money, and by August he had assembled the 3.8 million dollars the purchase required. Just two years after its inception, Il Giornale acquired Starbucks' assets and adopted the Starbucks name, folding the espresso-bar concept and the original retailer into a single company that kept the older and more resonant brand. The transaction is the true founding event of the modern Starbucks, marrying the bean merchant's sourcing credibility and roasting infrastructure to Schultz's beverage-led café model. Within months the combined company was opening stores outside Seattle, and within two years it was roasting more than two million pounds of coffee annually for a chain racing to outrun the modest ambitions of its original owners.

The renaming of employees as partners was the philosophical core of Schultz's people model, and Bean Stock was its instrument. In the letter announcing the program, Schultz wrote that his hope was that the reality of partnership would deepen partners' sense of pride, mutual support, and shared vision for the company, language that treated equity as a cultural device rather than a compensation line item. The company's retrospective frames Bean Stock as bringing value to the business at large, not merely to the grantees, by aligning frontline behavior with long-term company performance and making every hiring decision an admission of a new owner. The program's durability is its strongest evidence: more than three decades later, the company still describes it as a key part of its benefits package and its way of investing in what it calls its most important asset, its people, a formulation that has survived the IPO, multiple crises, and a procession of chief executives.

The origin story Schultz tells about benefits begins with his father's ankle. His father Fred cycled through poorly paid work as a truck driver and on factory floors, and when he broke his ankle on the job he was fired without medical benefits or compensation, leaving the family to absorb the injury's cost on its own. The experience shaped his son's conviction that a company's obligations to its workers extend beyond wages, a theme he carried directly into business practice at Starbucks with comprehensive health coverage and stock options extended to part-time workers. The policy program that made Starbucks famous as an employer, Bean Stock and health benefits for people working twenty hours a week, is best read as the institutional answer to a specific family memory of what employment without protection does to a household. The through-line from a Brooklyn childhood to partner benefits is the most consistent element of Schultz's public philosophy across four decades in business.

In 1981 Schultz was working as director of retail operations and marketing for Hammarplast, a Swedish housewares company, when he saw that a tiny Seattle coffee bean retailer kept ordering far more product than its size suggested. Curiosity, plus a salesman's instinct for an account behaving anomalously, took him to Seattle to see the customer for himself. The store was Starbucks, and Schultz found himself captivated by the passion and knowledge its founders had for coffee, an intensity of craft he had not encountered in the kitchenware business. He saw growth potential in what he found and joined the company a year later as director of marketing, trading a general manager's title at a European manufacturer's American subsidiary for a marketing role at a six-store coffee retailer. The decision, made on the evidence of an order book and a store visit, is the pivot on which the subsequent history of the company, and of American coffee culture, turned.

Schultz's strategic contribution was less the coffee than the place. The trip to Milan in 1983 was the turning point: he was struck by the espresso bars serving as community hubs and envisioned bringing that experience to the United States, while the Starbucks founders remained resistant, preferring to focus on selling high-quality beans and equipment. His response was to leave and build the concept himself at Il Giornale, which found early success, and then to purchase Starbucks for 3.8 million dollars in 1987, merging the companies and expanding rapidly from eleven stores to more than thirty thousand globally. The strategy centered on establishing a third place between home and work, built around customer experience, premium coffee, and a warm atmosphere, a positioning that allowed a commodity-adjacent product to command premium prices. After stepping down as chief executive in 2000, he returned in 2008, closed stores, retrained baristas, and reinvigorated the brand's core values, a turnaround after which the stock returned roughly sixteen-fold.

When Schultz returned as interim chief executive in April 2022, following the departure of Kevin Johnson, who had led the company since 2017, he was coming back to a company he had built over three decades from eleven stores and one hundred employees to twenty-eight thousand stores worldwide. He was also returning to the source of his reputation as a socially progressive and generous employer, since Starbucks had made its name extending health coverage, equity grants, and tuition-free college education to part-time as well as full-time workers. The difference in 2022 was that the reputation itself was the asset at risk, as workers across the country banded together to raise grievances and demand more from the company. The homecoming was framed as continuity, but the circumstances made it a referendum: the founder-employer who institutionalized partner benefits was now the executive whose workforce was organizing against the company's labor practices at unprecedented scale.

Since the previous year, a wave of union organizing that started in Buffalo had swept stores across the country. Close to 190 stores had petitioned for union elections, and ten had voted to join Workers United, half of them in Buffalo and the others in New York City, Mesa, Knoxville, and Starbucks' hometown of Seattle. Employees wanted higher wages, reworked scheduling, and a different approach to the handling of tips, among other demands. Some voiced frustration that pandemic benefits like hazard pay and daily food and drink allowances had been taken away even as sales rebounded and profits soared early in the pandemic; the company said it had replaced some benefits with others, such as paid isolation leave, as the pandemic evolved. At organizing stores, employees said their hours had been cut and unusual numbers of new hires added, and they argued that the company's anti-union activities were only fueling the campaign.

On the day his return was announced, Schultz said he had not planned to come back but knew the company was at a point where it had to transform once again, insisting that success was not an entitlement and that the company must continue to earn the trust of its people and customers every day. He then made his first concrete decision: Starbucks would immediately suspend its stock repurchasing program, with the stated logic that the decision would allow more investment in people and stores, which he described as the only way to create long-term value for all stakeholders. The reversal was material, since the previous October the company had said it would spend twenty billion dollars on dividends and buybacks over three years. Suspending repurchases meant less immediate support for the share price and more money for operations, a deliberate statement of capital-allocation priorities from a chief executive whose second stint had been defined by exactly this kind of rebalancing.

Schultz's posture toward the union drive was already well established before his return. In a speech to Starbucks workers in Buffalo the previous November, shortly before the union elections there, he had appealed to workers to consider everything the company had done and would continue to do to make Starbucks a great place to work, and he wrote in an accompanying letter that no partner had ever needed a representative to obtain what partners already had. The company fought the drive on multiple fronts, from mandatory meetings where employees were urged to vote no to repeated attempts to delay elections or vote counts by arguing that stores must vote together as districts, an argument the National Labor Relations Board rejected multiple times. Investors, including Trillium Asset Management's Jonas Kron, called the legal strategy a waste of resources and warned that customers could easily go elsewhere, while Harvard business historian Nancy Koehn expected the return to last months, not years.

The Philadelphia response became a case study in crisis communication. The company's initial statement acknowledged the situation and promised a policy review, but it failed to mention concerns about racial bias, falling short on specificity and sincerity even though it was swift. The second statement, from chief executive Kevin Johnson, took a targeted tone describing the outcome as reprehensible and reaffirming the company's opposition to discrimination and racial profiling, and Johnson released a video taking personal ownership of the incident. MIT Sloan lecturer Roberta Pittore's framework held that in a social-media environment a response must be swift, specific, and sincere, and the revised statement indicated leadership had grasped the incident's gravity only after the first attempt fell flat. The gap between the two statements is the lesson: a general assurance of good intentions reads as insincerity when the incident at issue is specific, tangible, and visible to everyone watching.

Johnson then traveled to Pennsylvania to meet the two men who had been arrested and apologize face to face, a move Pittore judged appropriate to the climate around the incident. In May 2018 the company reached a financial settlement with the pair for an undisclosed amount, along with a promise to help them complete their bachelor's degrees through the company's tuition assistance program, a resolution that asked the men what recompense would actually look like rather than imposing one. The centerpiece remained the decision to close more than eight thousand stores for an afternoon of racial-bias education reaching 175,000 employees, which Pittore called the right call while cautioning that a single afternoon could not eradicate unconscious bias. Her measured endorsement captured the strategic logic that acting beats waiting, that doing more beats doing less, and that moving sooner beats moving later, a sequencing standard against which corporate crisis responses are still measured.

The deeper problem the arrests exposed was structural to the business model. At the core of the Starbucks brand is the idea that its shops serve as a third place for meet-ups, studying, and work, and with the arrests a single store manager's decision put that carefully built persona of a socially progressive, inclusive community hangout at risk of unraveling. Pittore's reading is blunt about what the company actually sells: not a cup of coffee but membership in the part of the community people occupy when they are neither at the office nor at home, which must feel safe and welcoming to function at all. She framed the Philadelphia incident as a societal problem of racial bias surfacing through one employee's actions in a highly visible way, and she argued the company should audit its policies, board composition, workforce demographics, and wage structures to decide where on the spectrum of social consciousness it genuinely intends to operate.

The 2007 crisis that brought Schultz back began as an internal argument about brand decay. Seven years after he stepped down as chief executive, Starbucks had, in his own account, become overly focused on its stock price and was losing sight of its mission, while changing customer expectations, emerging technologies, and a foreboding recession compounded the problem. A Consumer Reports taste test that year rated Starbucks coffee behind McDonald's, an outside validation of what insiders already suspected about quality drift. Acting as chairman, Schultz wrote a memo for the leadership team cataloguing the bad decisions, titled for the commoditization of the Starbucks experience; the document leaked to the internet and created massive internal havoc, airing the founder's diagnosis of the company's drift in public. The leak forced the question of whether the board would let the architect of the brand fix what his successors had built on top of it, and the answer arrived within a year.

Schultz reassumed the chief executive role in 2008 to fix the problems the memo had catalogued, reassessing the company's mission and developing a plan to return it to its core values that became known as the Transformation Agenda. Its most visible act came on February 26, 2008, when Starbucks closed 7,100 stores for a three-and-a-half-hour afternoon of barista retraining, a call that financial analysts disliked but that Schultz deemed mandatory to the journey of restoring the mission. The afternoon of training re-energized the associates, in the account of his memoir Onward, and communicated the company's commitment to the experience it sold. Closing the entire domestic fleet to practice making espresso converted a cost line into a public statement of standards, the founder betting that the market would eventually pay for craft the company had let slip in the pursuit of growth.

Later in 2008 came a harder decision: shuttering 600 stores and laying off twelve thousand employees, cuts that ran alongside the retraining and gave the Transformation Agenda its substance. Much of the memoir's narrative concerns rebuilding the management team, with Schultz working to find the right people for key positions while identifying new business opportunities and new technologies, including the Clover coffee brewer acquired with the Coffee Equipment Company. When the financial meltdown hit in September 2008, Schultz resisted pressure to cancel the company's biennial leadership conference and instead held it in New Orleans, a city still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina, gathering thousands of managers in a deliberately chosen symbol of recovery. The choice to spend money on people and place at the bottom of a recession expressed the operating thesis of the entire turnaround, that the company's renewal would come through its employees or not at all.