With nearly half a billion global customer purchases per week across its stores and 3rd party retail channels, a significant portion of the human population gets their daily fix in the green and white paper cup.
Including our own Ben Gilbert who famously enjoys his daily spinach feta wrap. Starting from six tiny stores when Howard took over in , this quirky coffee company named after a character from Moby Dick has scaled to nearly 40, locations worldwide. Today, in a first for Acquired, the protagonist himself joins us as a third cohost to tell the whole story of Starbucks.
Thank you! You're now subscribed to our email list, and will get new episodes when they drop. Ben: Welcome to season 14 episode 5 of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. Ben: And we are your hosts. Ben: Well today, we have a very special third co-host to discuss this third place, Howard Schultz. Howard started working at the small chain of three Starbucks stores in , eventually buying it and becoming CEO. As you probably know, he is effectively the founder of the Starbucks we know today that exists on every corner of the earth.
I come to you, David, and listeners as an unabashed Starbucks fan. In this tumultuous time for the company, I am absolutely pulling for them in every way possible, and that is going to come through in our conversation.
You may have seen the news recently that they had a very rough last quarter with a key metric that you may remember from previous episodes as same store sales. These dropped and their stock price plummeted as a result. This is on top of a tumultuous pandemic era, some of their stores unionizing, and a change in leadership.
