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How I Built This with Guy Raz

Live Episode! Starbucks: Howard Schultz

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.831.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During his first visit to Seattle in 1981, Howard Schultz walked into a little coffee bean shop called Starbucks and fell in love with it. A few years later, he bought the six-store chain for almost 4 million dollars, and began to transform it into a ubiquitous landmark, a "third place" between home and work. Today Starbucks is the third largest restaurant chain in the world, serving about 100 million people a week. Recorded live in Seattle. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

0:07.0

Download the app today.

0:09.0

New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

0:13.0

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

0:17.0

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

0:24.0

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

0:31.0

When I returned as CEO, which I never had planned to come back, I would say that there were people both on the board at the time, and many people at Starbucks, and certainly hundreds of people at Wall Street that said you're bringing him back?

0:46.0

I mean, he's the problem.

0:51.0

Ramen PR is how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

1:08.0

I'm Guy Ross, and on the show today, I will pour a kid from the projects in Brooklyn, turned a small coffee company in Seattle, into the third largest restaurant chain in the world.

1:23.0

There was a time in America when a typical coffee experience involved a Styrofoam cup at like a PTA meeting or a church social, and it was usually served out of a giant aluminum urn, warming up that coffee for hours and hours, and sometimes there'd be a pink cardboard box of half-eaten glazed doughnuts next to it.

1:45.0

And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky, because you may not know how hard it was to find good coffee in America before Starbucks.

1:56.0

Now I know, I know some of you are haters, some of you wouldn't be cut dead in a Starbucks, too ubiquitous, too corporate, and that's okay, that's totally fine.

2:06.0

But just consider for a moment how much coffee culture in America owes to Starbucks and to Howard Schultz, because if he hadn't stumbled into a little coffee bean and spice shop in Seattle called Starbucks in 1981, it may never have become what it is today.

2:25.0

Now at the time, Starbucks was just a local chain in Seattle, and it didn't sell brewed coffee just the beans, but Howard was so blown away by the quality of the coffee he tasted from those beans that he quit his job and begged the owners of Starbucks to hire him.

2:43.0

Then six years later, when those same owners decided to sell, Howard raised the money to buy the company, and just a few years after that, he took Starbucks National.

2:55.0

Now today there are 27,000 Starbucks locations in roughly 70 countries around the world, which isn't bad for a kid who grew up poor in Brooklyn.

3:06.0

A couple weeks ago, in Seattle, I sat down with Howard in front of a live audience to hear about how he took that Seattle coffee bean shop and turned it into the Starbucks we know today.

3:17.0

Thank you very much.

3:24.0

They didn't think you would be here, that's why they cheered so loud. They could not believe you walked out. They were just amazed.

3:30.0

By the way, how many cups of coffee do you drink every day?

3:34.0

Probably four or five a day.

...

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