Starbucks’ Journey In 1971, Professors Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker of University of San Francisco, opened the first coffee shop ‘Starbucks’ in Seattle, USA. The coffee shop offered a speciality of whole-bean coffee, tea and spices to the connoisseurs.
Howard Schultz was working for a Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturer-Hammer Plast. He was heading a team of twenty looking after the sales responsibility. Once he was startled to notice that a small shop called Starbucks had ordered for a large quantity of plastic cone filters. During his meeting with three Starbucks promoters, he was amazed by their passion and depth of knowledge about coffee seeds, they possessed. He was impressed and offered to join their business but was…show more content… He envisioned a similar café culture in the U.S. as well. He persuaded the owners to extend the brand ‘Starbucks’ into a chain of coffee shops or cafés where people could socialise and relax. He felt that the retail company should not restrict itself to just dispensing exclusive coffee beans and seed crushing machines. Hence first café of Starbucks was opened in downtown Seattle serving Starbucks Caffe’ Latte. Despite first café’s success, the three owners were not keen to enter the restaurant business. Schultz then decided to leave Starbucks in…show more content… Schultz kept to himself the role of Chief Creative Officer. By 2008, however the company’s performance was flagging. The stock price had been flat over last eight years, and competition had made in-roads into their territory. The corporation’s growth was getting more dependent on new stores opening. The sales revenues were growing only because of that reason and sales numbers of same-store were static. Schultz sensing it decided to step-in to retain the core values and reverse the sales trend. The brand integrity needed to be preserved and the Starbucks could not be allowed to become a commodity. He took some tough measures, removed most of the top executives and closed non-performing stores. According to him, operational excellence and customer experience could not be sacrificed for growth. Stock market welcomed his return and by March 2015, stock price has jumped five-fold since