A great business has to have a conscience. You have to know who you are and who you are not.
When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.
I tried to build a company my father would have been proud to work for, that he would have looked back on and said, 'That's the company that honoured me, even though I don't have an education'. I wanted to build a company that had a conscience.
The challenge of the retail business is the human condition.
In the 1960s, if you introduced a new product to America, 90% of the people who viewed it for the first time believed in the corporate promise. Then 40 years later if you performed the same exercise, less than 10% of the public believed it was true. The fracturing of trust is based on the fact that the consumer has been let down.
The lifeblood of job creation in America is small business, but they can't get access to credit.
When you're building a business or joining a company, you have to be transparent; you can't have two sets of information for two sets of people.
I think what we're lacking in society, not only in the U.S. but also around the world, is to find heroes once again and to celebrate these kind of people.
California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks' largest country, with almost 3,000 stores.
My kids probably started drinking coffee in their late teens.
Anybody can leverage celebrity for profit.
Customers have different need states and life experiences.
This may sound a bit naive, but I got here by believing in big dreams.
Starbucks is in my blood. It is such a part of me that letting it unravel simply was not an option.
The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.
The premium single-cup segment is the fastest-growing business within the global coffee industry.
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can't cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.
Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy.
Profitability is a shallow goal if it doesn't have a real purpose, and the purpose has to be share the profits with others.
We need to reinvent food at Starbucks. Less could be more.
