Introduction

Starbucks Corporation is a multinational coffee and coffee house corporation

headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA. It began as a single small store in 1971
and grew to become a coffee behemoth by the end of the millennium. Starbucks has
sparked a coffee revolution in the United States and around the world. Jerry Baldwin,
Zev Siegl, and Gordon Browker founded the store. The three Starbucks founders
had two things in common: they were all academics who loved coffee and tea. They
borrowed and invested money to open the first Starbucks in Seattle, which they
named "Starbucks" after Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick's first mate,
Starbuck.

Fred Peet, a coffee-roasting entrepreneur, was a major inspiration to the

Starbucks founders. Peet was a Dutch immigrant who began importing fine arabica
coffees into the United States in the 1950s. In 1966, he opened Peet's Coffee and
Tea in Berkeley, California, specializing in importing high-quality coffees and teas.
Peet's success inspired the Starbucks founders to build their business model around
selling high-quality coffee beans and equipment, and Peet's became Starbucks' first
supplier of green coffee beans. Baldwin and Bowker experimented with Alfred Peet's
roasting techniques to create their own blends and flavors after purchasing a used
roaster from Holland.

By the early 1980s, Starbucks had opened four stores in Seattle that
distinguished themselves from competitors with their high-quality fresh-roasted
coffees. In 1980, Siegl decided to pursue other interests and left the two remaining
partners, with Baldwin taking over as company president.

In 1981, Howard Schultz, a sales representative for Hammarplast, a Swedish

company that manufactured kitchen equipment and housewares from which
Starbucks purchased drip-coffee makers, noticed the company's large orders and
decided to pay it a visit. Schultz was so impressed that he decided to work for
Starbucks and was hired as the company's head of marketing in 1982. Schultz
noticed that first-time customers were sometimes uneasy in the stores due to their
lack of knowledge about fine coffees, so he worked with store employees to develop
customer-friendly sales skills and created brochures to help customers learn about
the company's products.
 Schultz's most significant insight into Starbucks' future came in the spring of
1983, when the company sent him to Milan to attend an international housewares
show. While in Italy, he was impressed by the country's cafés, discovering that Milan
alone had 1,500. Inspired, he imagined doing something similar at Starbucks,
transforming a small regional operation into a national coffeehouse chain through
rapid store expansion. However, Baldwin and Bowker were not enthusiastic about
Schultz's idea because they did not want Starbucks to stray too far from its traditional
business model. They wanted Starbucks to remain solely a coffee and equipment
retailer, rather than a café serving espressos and cappuccinos.

Recognizing that he would be unable to persuade Baldwin and Bowker to

embrace the café concept, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to launch his own coffee
chain, Il Giornale, which was an instant success, quickly expanding into multiple
cities.

When Baldwin and Bowker decided to sell Starbucks in March 1987, Schultz
jumped at the chance, using Il Giornale to buy the company with investor backing.
He merged all of his operations under the Starbucks brand and committed to the
café business model, with additional sales of beans, equipment, and other items in
Starbucks stores. Under Schultz's leadership, the coffeehouse chain expanded from
20 to more than 100 locations in four years.

Starbucks began a meteoric period of growth that lasted until the company
went public in 1992. Starbucks began opening stores outside of North America in
1996, and it quickly became the world's largest coffeehouse chain. Starbucks had
2,500 locations in about a dozen countries by the end of the decade.

In 2000, Schultz announced that he would step down as CEO but would
remain chairman. By 2007, the company had over 15,000 locations worldwide, but it
was in trouble, and Schultz returned as CEO in January 2008. He oversaw the
closure of 900 stores and implemented an ambitious growth strategy that included
the acquisitions of a bakery chain and the makers of a coffee-brewing system, as
well as the launch of an instant-coffee brand. He also oversaw changes to Starbucks
menu offerings; Starbucks began selling food in its cafés in 2003. These moves were
mostly successful, and Starbucks had recovered financially by 2012.
In 2017, Schultz stepped down as CEO once more, and Kevin Johnson took over as
CEO. Schultz remained active in the company as executive chairman until 2018,
when he was succeeded by Myron Ullman. In 2019, Chicago welcomed the world's
largest Starbucks, a Starbucks Reserve Roastery. Starbucks had a global presence
in dozens of countries and over 32,000 stores in 2021.

However, Starbucks was facing a number of challenges at the time. Notably,

despite the company's opposition, workers at several of its stores began to unionize.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic and related supply-chain issues harmed
sales, particularly in China, one of the company's key markets. Johnson abruptly left
in 2022, and Schultz took over as interim CEO. Later that year, Starbucks
announced that it had hired Laxman Narasimhan to succeed Schultz in 2023.