Starbucks

“Starbucks and Howard Schultz was actually one of the biggest retailers of CDs. In the U.S.”

“Jeff was one of the first investors and board members of Starbucks.”

“Founder leaves, I'm not talking about me, it's you, historically, and companies lose not only the extent of the entrepreneurial DNA, but they lose the ability to be on offense. And the worst thing that a company can do, like a sports team, is start playing def…”

“Well, not only that, but every food company, every retail food business from McDonald's on, took a page out of Starbucks, went to school on us, put espresso machines in their stores, and started doing coffee beverages. That also expanded the market.”

“Jerry gave me about, I think he gave me 90 days to raise 3.8 million dollars. Around the second month, he just came to me and said, where are you with all this? And I think I had about half of it raised. I might have fibbed a bit and said I had a little bit mo…”

“Bill did not know the whole story. He didn't know any of it. He didn't know what his father had done for me. He's hearing it for the first time.”

“Subsequently, Craig Weatherup and I, on a napkin, I swear, shook hands and created a multi-billion dollar business For Pepsi and Starbucks and a fifty-fifty JV and bottle Frappuccino.”

“So those initial grants, the strike price was six dollars per share. Today, as we speak, the share price is 77 dollars, but there have been six splits since then, which comes out to a 64 X. So that initial grant has 800 X'd since even the part-time employees a…”

“I went up there, and I laid it out. Chapter and verse. I think we have seven months left. We are going to be insolvent.”

“Your low point in 2008 profits were three hundred and fifteen million, and by 20 10 they were nine hundred and forty five million.”

“He was right, except for one, the general counsel. They were all gone.”

“Never had a negative comp month in my history of the company.”

“We didn't spend any money on marketing. Zero. It was no money for market in the cup. The iconic cup became a badge of honor because people were doing something that was new and novel and walking in the street with it”

“That was Gloria Jeans out of Chicago. And at one point, I think they had more stores than we did because of the franchising opportunity.”

“And then I had this economic formula of how many customers it would take per store to turn comps around. And the number was low. It's like less than 10 per day or 11 per day.”

“The day I came back, and I knew what the market would do, is I announced that we were suspending the stock buybacks, and stock went down. I expected it, and I announced that we were going to take basically the money we were using to stock buybacks for the year…”

“The interesting thing to me today is that the Asian business is operating at a much higher level Of the soft side of Starbucks than we are in the U S”

“No, everyone was lowercase from the beginning. Out of respect. Everyone's lowercase.”

“I think I, the number that people use inside the company is a 100,000 different variations of beverages that are being made consistently. A 100,000 different beverages.”

“First of all, Starbucks never paid for placement.”

“I never believed that we could build, maintain, and elevate the culture of the company, which I viewed as the thing in a franchise system, where we had individual franchisees who had their own subculture. And so even though there was pressure early on because …”

“Right now, at any given time, there's about 1.8 billion dollars of cash that Starbucks has gotten in the form effectively of as an advance from customers that Starbucks can use to operate.”

“It's a two x is what I believe.”

“On that holiday, a friend of mine Not, I didn't know he was there, but it was Michael Dell was there. And I must've talked to him almost every day about the transformation of Starbucks. And he was going through a similar thing at Dell almost at the same time. …”

“The model basically was a sales to investment ratio of two to one. And a operating profit of 20%.”

“The worst thing that could happen to a company is believing that you are incapable of doing anything but succeeding, and you deserve the success. But if you start playing defense and don't have the offensive mind, it's not going to go well. And I think over ti…”

“I think today, 33% of Starbucks orders are done with mobile order and pay.”

“Maybe the most valuable person in the company, from my view.”

“The Coke meeting was a meeting lasted less than 30 minutes. I can't remember who I met with. They dismissed me didn't view Starbucks or, didn't understand what I was trying to do and didn't give me much time to even explain it.”

“Starbucks coffee company from 1971 until around 8586, only sold pounds of coffee. There was no beverage.”

“Starbucks is responsible for roasting the coffee, for all the recipes which are consistent with Starbucks worldwide, A co design of the store where we're designing the store with the JV or the licensed partner, and they control all the operations.”

“August of 87. We bought the six Starbucks stores. We had the three old Eldranales, and there were two stores under construction. So at the end of the calendar year, we had 11 stores And a hundred employees in 1987.”

“There's mainly two types of agricultural coffee grown for commercial use. Robusta beans, low-end coffee, primarily in instant coffee, and high-grade Arabica coffee. But even within the Arabica coffee, there's significant segments of quality and integrity, and …”

“No, it was totally my childhood. My parents were always in debt. Bill collectors were always calling. And no, there was, we never had any debt the entire time. Never.”

“There are not, no individual licensed franchises of any kind, unless it's certain real estate that we can't get, that we want access to. Like, a roadway on a highway in Switzerland, or something odd.”

“Ultimately we gave 14% of everyone's base pay in the form of stock options at the end of the year based on the strike price. And I had to do it the year before the IPO.”

“Howard Schultz should have said to them, I want an exclusive on that lid. Because that lid became the standard for the world. If I would have just understood that.”

“In fact, putting Starbucks in Costco, we were able to measure directly The increase in volume in the stores on the east side as a result of the proximity to the Costco store.”

“What is it, 70% of drinks are now iced beverages, and it was when you started, zero percent.”

“It is the biggest Achilles heel for Starbucks. And it's not even a close second.”

“Do you know where Jeff Bezos and Jim Senegal met for the first time? Not in a Costco, in the Starbucks, in the Barnes and Noble, in Bellevue.”

“On the corner of Fourth and Spring in Seattle, and it was the sixth Starbucks store, and out of about 1200 square feet, I got a hundred feet, and I designed and opened the coffee bar, worked behind the counter as a barista, and Starbucks probably had two to 30…”

“The first thing I want to say is I've made it clear to the Starbucks board, Howard Schultz, and I've made it clear to Loxman, Howard Schultz has no desire or intent to return as CEO of Starbucks.”

“So in 1988, the health benefits roll out even to Part-time employees, including gay couples in domestic partnerships. I believe the first of its kind. That was a 33 store company at that point.”

“Now between 83 and 85, Jerry Baldwin, because of his love of Pete's and his relation with Alfred Pete, had an opportunity for Starbucks to acquire Pete's Coffee Company. And they did. Unfortunately, Starbucks buys Pete's, and they get into financial trouble.”

“Two, three years later, what do you think the number one beverage is? It's espresso. For Starbucks. Straight espresso. Espresso is the number one beverage.”

“I was looking up, I was trying to figure out, you know, your public comps at the time. I think there were zero publicly traded coffee companies, not bean companies, not retailers, not coffee house chains.”

“Now what is not known is that when Starbucks opened in the Pike Place Market in 1971, they were using Pete's Coffee. No one knows that. That's new. Because they were not roasting coffee. So they were bringing coffee from San Francisco to Seattle. They were not…”

“I did a hundred quarterly conference calls as CEO. A hundred. That's a lot of earnings prep, because each one of those has, what, two weeks before it of. The truth is, the majority of those were no script.”

“And I think the company made some early mistakes. Some of which were COVID related. Again, no textbook had to deal with COVID issues, health issues, safety issues. And then I think underestimated the groundswell of public sentiment for this movement in America…”

“The year after it launched, in 1996, Frappuccinos were seven percent of revenue.”

“The other thing I didn't do is we introduced cafe latte to the, to America. We didn't trademark it. You know, we trademarked Frappuccino later on, but we didn't trademark cafe latte.”

“In terms of velocity, about fourteen billion dollars a year gets loaded onto gift cards.”

“Belinda decided that she could go to the government and go to an insurance company and come back to Starbucks and get government approval for Starbucks to do the first, do something had never been done before and provide health insurance to the parents and gra…”

“There certainly was a fair amount of discussion all the time about the sensitivity of the price points, and I think in later years, maybe in the last couple years, given the consumer inflationary time, I think it's become a bit of a problem.”

“We struggled in China for almost a decade. Lost money. There was tremendous pressure inside the company of close China.”

“The ability to source and roast coffee And put that through the supply chain of a beverage gave us probably at the time an 80% gross margin.”

“We got turned down by Goldman Sachs.”

“There has always been stories that all these competitors were going to steal business from Starbucks, but from. 1983 to all the way today, the consumption, especially coffee is still a small amount relative to the macro opportunity. So all those people have ex…”

“First, Jeff Brotman invested in Starbucks in the round to buy Starbucks.”

“Because the previous administration had done things that diluted the integrity of coffee to maximize yield.”

“If Starbucks were a bank, and you treated the gift cards as deposits, it would be in the top 10% by deposits of banks in the United States.”