Starbucks Onward Summary

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Awake as usual at 4:00 a.m., Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sipped a cup of Tribute Blend coffee as he reviewed the galley proofs for his latest memoir—Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul. The quiet surroundings gave him an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable ride that had brought him and Starbucks to January 2011, the beginning of the company’s fortieth year. During those four decades, Starbucks had grown from a single location in Seattle, Washington, to a multibillion-dollar enterprise that operated more than 17,000 retail stores in fifty countries. Originally selling only coffee beans and ground coffee, it had added to its offerings prepared coffee, Italian-style espresso beverages, cold blended drinks, …show more content…

It also had a roasting facility and a wholesale business. This growth attracted the attention of Schultz, then the vice president of the American subsidiary of Hammarplast, a Swedish housewares company that made plastic cone coffee filters for home coffee brewing. Schultz went to Seattle to find out why a small company called Starbucks ordered more of these filters than any other customer. He liked what he found and joined Starbucks later that year as director of retail operations. During a business trip to Milan, Italy, the following year, Schultz was struck by the city’s ubiquitous espresso bars. The bars served well-prepared espresso and brewed coffee and were important places for conversation and socializing. Schultz realized that America lacked similar places offering high-quality coffee in a comfortable setting for meeting and relaxing. He left Milan with a determination to create such an establishment in America. Schultz later dubbed this “the third place” beyond home and work, a term he borrowed from The Great, Good Place, a book in which sociologist Ray Oldenburg laments the decline of traditional American community meeting places like country stores and soda …show more content…

(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1999). 4 Arthur Thompson and John Gamble, “Starbucks Case Study,” McGraw Hill, http://www.mhhe.com/business/management/ thompson/11e/case/starbucks.html. 5 Bryant Simon, Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 11. 6 Ibid., 50. 2 KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT This document is authorized for use only by Mingyu Jin in Strategic Management. SP 2015 taught by Stewart, University of Denver from March 2015 to June 2015. For the exclusive use of M. Jin, 2015. KEL665 STARBUCKS: A STORY OF GROWTH freshness, flavor, and aroma. Starbucks espresso drinks were also prepared in a different way: a barista, a master of both the art and science of coffee production, “pulled” shots of espresso by hand using a La Marzocco machine, steamed milk to just the right temperature, and scooped elegant dollops of foam for cappuccinos, all while chatting with customers about the different varieties of Starbucks

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