2. Marco teórico
2.5.4 Taxonomías de errores
O
n a wintry Wednesday morning in downtown Seattle, a capacity crowd of several thousand waited inside McCaw Hall, the city’s elegant new glass-fronted auditorium, not knowing exactly what to ex-pect. When the twinkling scarlet curtain lifted, the hum of the audi-ence gave way to a collective gasp: onstage, a full choir stood bathed in purple light, bellowing the fiery opening bars of “O Fortuna,”from Carl Orff ’s tempestuous Carmina Burana. Timpani drums thundered. A grand piano surged and crashed. With this maelstrom roaring before them, the spectators exchanged bemused, astonished glances; this was, after all, a legally mandated meeting of shareholders.
While some corporations just hold their annual public meetings in the lunchroom at headquarters, Starbucks — a company whose busi-ness model relies on creating hysterical enthusiasm about something that amounts to roasted beans steeped in water — has always ap-proached the task with flair. Every February, Starbucks rents out a Se-attle auditorium and stages a hugely popular three-hour-long ode to itself, complete with staged antics and surprise celebrity cameos. For
this, the 2006 meeting, McCaw Hall’s twenty-nine hundred seats proved insufficient to accommodate the five thousand shareholders who came from all over the country to take in both the spectacle and the free Starbucks swag. (A pair of elderly women on the scene de-clared this year’s loot woefully inadequate, however: “It’s just bags of coffee . . . that’s it!”) Not many corporate meetings are enticing and entertaining enough to require huge swaths of overflow seating, but this one is; anticipation about which star will appear leaves the crowd rapt. Just like Starbucks itself, it’s coffee theater.
As the singers chanted their way through Orff ’s rousing piece, slides of Starbucks-related scenes flashed faster and faster on a giant screen behind them. Even the sign language interpreter at stage right gesticulated with ever-increasing ferocity. And as the stirring final notes resounded to jubilant applause, out walked Howard Schultz.
This was an oddly theatrical introduction for someone who has long maintained the image of a selfless public servant, even while build-ing a globe-straddlbuild-ing, multibillion-dollar coffee goliath. A tall, excep-tionally poised man with wavy chestnut hair and an impeccable wardrobe, Schultz possesses a gift for making people see in him ex-actly what he wants them to see. Today, striding coolly across the stage in a dark gray pinstripe suit, he projected a balance of relaxed confi-dence and embarrassment at the ovations being heaped on him. In his college days, Schultz was a student of communications and public speaking; this was his element.
“As I was coming out, I was handed a note that with our stock price at its all-time high —” he began, but cheers from the audience quickly drowned him out. The promise of celebrity sightings and free coffee makes for effective bait, but the spectators also came to celebrate the profits they had reaped from their investment in Starbucks — in just the last two years, the company’s shares had doubled in value, and they were soaring again even as Schultz spoke. One might think that after fifteen years of the company’s explosive growth, the onlookers would be a bit bored with their double-digit capital gains. But no; when
A Caffeinated Craze
Schultz reminded everyone that a $10,000 investment in Starbucks in 1992 would be worth nearly $650,000 that day, the audience stoked itself into a sort of financial rapture.
Given this euphoric response, Schultz could have just lobbed some more figures at the crowd and relied on the mystery guest to provide the pizzazz. But because of his charisma and his unique, touchy-feely management style — not to mention the astronomical success of his company — the Starbucks chief is now something of a star in his own right. In 2000, Schultz traded in his CEO title for the loftier “Chief Global Strategist” tag, so imparting his “vision” is now his primary job;
“inspiration” is his stock in trade. To Schultz, Starbucks is more than a mere money-making enterprise. Instead of talking about financial targets and cold numbers, he spoke earnestly of Starbucks as a balm for our “secular existence” and told the crowd how honored he felt to be able to “share with you the dreams and aspirations we have for the future.” He even mentioned the human condition. (The company’s investors are happy to indulge the New Age–speak as long as Schultz’s most important vision, the one of a forty-thousand-store coffee mega-lith, keeps inching closer to reality.) Schultz sometimes looks vaguely smug in photos, but in person he seems the model of the self-effacing, nonthreatening leader striving to be genuine — the kind of guy you might like to chat with over a venti chai latte.
The day was no soul-searching retreat, however; the people were there for a show, and Schultz gamely led the festivities. On the giant screen behind him, a recent Late Show with David Letterman stunt be-gan playing: from a spigot at the desk in Letterman’s Manhattan stu-dio, the show’s staff had strung 550 feet of clear plastic tubing all the way to a Starbucks down the street. The attending barista, Brad, hit the switch on a pump, and a jet of decaf Sumatra shot down Broadway, ar-riving ice-cold in the host’s mug. When Letterman declared that “One day, every house in America will have their own private plumbing to Starbucks,” the shareholders roared. Schultz promised a “Seattle-style”
interpretation of the feat, and everyone cheered as they watched coffee
spiral down the nearby Space Needle and into McCaw Hall, culminat-ing with Schultz raisculminat-ing a triumphant mug to the audience. For those who hadn’t yet grasped the message that this company was God’s crowning commercial achievement on earth, a slew of pro-Starbucks television clips played next — including one of Oprah Winfrey ex-claiming, seemingly at random, “Yay, Starbucks!” And later, on came the special guest at last: Tony Bennett, who sang a few standards and told the crowd they were beautiful.
Before the festivities began, though, Schultz presented his yearly reminder that the success of Starbucks didn’t come easily — indeed, on a number of occasions the company nearly failed altogether. “Not only was it not an overnight success, but I laugh sometimes when I hear Starbucks partners [aka employees] talk about the good old days, the glory days,” he said. “I gotta tell ya, they weren’t that good.” In a sense, Starbucks never should have worked. Twenty years ago, a na-tional chain of stylish cafés selling coffee at unheard-of prices seemed as likely to succeed as a designer corn-on-the-cob vendor or a luxury thumbtack company — and Schultz knows this as well as anyone.
This is the mystique of Starbucks. “People weren’t drinking coffee,”
he explained to Larry King in 1997. “So the question is, how could a company create retail stores where coffee was not previously sold, . . . charge three times more for it than the local doughnut shop, put Italian names on it that no one can pronounce, and then have six million customers a week coming through the stores?”
Actually, that weekly customer number was at forty million and counting as of 2006, making Starbucks one of the most-trafficked retail companies in the world. But the question remains: How did this niche phenomenon take hold on such a massive scale? And why would urban epicures and blue-collar mainstreamers alike form a fierce daily need for decadent, expensive, European coffee drinks? Common sense ex-pected Schultz’s multithousand-store fantasy to fail, but the mood in McCaw Hall — the sheer intensity of the crowd’s ardor for a company that isn’t selling anything that innovative — gives us a clue about why
A Caffeinated Craze
the opposite happened. Without doubt, coffee itself was (and still is) a certifiable craze. It tastes good, it boosts energy, and in a pinch, you can even use it to exterminate frogs. Yet how excited can people really get about coffee and milk? Starbucks’s worldwide explosion was about more than coffee; it was about the way the company was selling it. As we’ll see, coffeehouses provided something society needed: a place to just be. But no one had any idea how badly we needed it.
The Idea Strikes
Setting foot in Milan for the first time, one is tempted to characterize the city as being “functional” or “culturally robust” in the same way that a tactful person might describe a female friend as having a “good personality” — that is, they’re each exceptional in their own right, but you wouldn’t quite want to hang a picture of either one on the wall.
This is no city of sunlit piazzas and elegantly dilapidated terraces; with its vaunted high-fashion industry and its legendary opera house, La Scala, Milan is cosmopolitan and culturally vital, but homely. As Italy’s commercial and industrial hub, the city exudes efficient sturdiness and overwhelming gray.
There is one way in which the Milanese live a more beautiful life than their compatriots to the south, however. Take a stroll through the heart of the city, and every twenty yards — virtually without fail — you will pass a bustling espresso bar. In fact, Milan’s 1.3 million citizens have their pick of more than fifteen hundred of them, a figure that puts Seattle’s measly 650-odd coffeehouses to shame.
Enter a busy one, and a blur of activity soon engulfs you. From wall to wall, a mass of business-suited, cigarette-smoking humanity waits to be served, as Top 40 radio competes with the buzz of conversation and hundreds of clattering dishes for auditory supremacy. Behind the
Seriously — caffeine is incredibly toxic to them.
marble bar, baristas — typically male and clad in navy slacks, matching vest, and collared white shirt — greet each customer with a “Prego.”
The standard order is a simple espresso shot; almost no one requests a milk drink, and if they do, it’s a small cappuccino. Preparing the same order every fifteen seconds has made each barista into a kind of coffee ninja. In a whirl of lightning-quick motions, he grinds and tamps down the coffee, locks in the portafilter, and slams a demitasse down below.
Within seconds, he sets a white porcelain cup and saucer in front of the customer, along with a tiny spoon. (He’d sooner hand the customer an old shoe than serve the drink in a paper to-go cup.) Since there are no seats, everyone stands and sips at the bar, chatting with others for a moment before paying the tab and moving on. The entire experience takes less than five minutes.
When Howard Schultz first witnessed this spectacle in the spring of 1983, the experience literally made him tremble with excitement — not because he loved the feel of the viscous espresso trickling over his tongue, but because he immediately knew he had found the idea that would make him rich. At the time, Schultz was in the opening months of his new job as Starbucks’s director of marketing, and the company had sent him to Milan to attend a housewares exhibition. One morn-ing, while walking from his hotel to the convention center, Schultz happened to duck into a coffee bar; soon, he was visiting them all over Milan, his heart aflutter. Here was an entirely different take on coffee: whereas Starbucks offered it by the pound in retail stores, these places were social hubs, like all-day cocktail parties. And in-stead of coming in once a week for beans, the Italians visited espresso bars several times a day. According to his 1997 autobiography, Pour Your Heart into It — which has more than three hundred thousand copies in print — these insights sparked an epiphany for Schultz.
“It was so immediate and physical that I was shaking,” he wrote. “It seemed so obvious. . . . If we could re-create in America the authentic Italian coffee bar culture, it might resonate with other Americans the way it did with me.” At that moment, Schultz became the true believer,
A Caffeinated Craze
an espresso evangelist determined to bring his vision of a chain of Italian-style coffee bars to life. In hindsight, this scheme sounds both brilliant and financially prudent. But at the time, even the eager Schultz knew the idea he was pushing was a huge, potentially disas-trous gamble. “Howard will always say he knew this would work, but he’s full of shit,” Howard Behar, a member of Starbucks’s board of di-rectors who was Schultz’s right-hand man for many years, told me.
“We didn’t know how it would turn out.”
Gourmet coffee was, in every regard, a strange career path for Schultz. Born in 1952 to working-class parents, Schultz spent his child-hood in Brooklyn’s federally subsidized Bayview Projects. He was a mediocre student but a gifted athlete and an obsessive Yankees fan; for years, he drew Mickey Mantle’s uniform number, seven, on all of his belongings. Growing up, Schultz believed his athleticism would carry him out of the projects, and he budgeted his time accordingly. Every spare moment went to pickup baseball, basketball, and football games in the P.S. 272 schoolyard, where your team had to win to stay on the field. At Canarsie High, a 5,700-student school too cash-strapped to pay for even a home football field, Schultz was the star quarterback.
“He wasn’t really a great football talent, but he was a really hard worker,” one of his teammates, Mike Camardese, told a BBC televi-sion crew in 2002. “The team back then wasn’t that good, so he was al-ways getting banged around. But he alal-ways came back.”
More than anything, Schultz wanted to avoid turning out like his father. Fred Schultz worked a string of low-paying, blue-collar jobs, from delivering diapers to driving a cab, which left his homemaker wife and three children with no savings to fall back on if he were un-able to work. Howard thought his father had no dignity, and he re-sented his family’s poverty deeply; once, the young Schultz refused to return to a summer camp after discovering that it was for children from needy families. It wasn’t until after Fred Schultz’s death in 1988, from lung cancer, that Howard forgave his failure to provide better for the family. (His father also expressed doubt that people would ever pay
as much for coffee as his son was charging, while his mother, Bobbie, drank instant coffee and never developed a taste for Starbucks’s roast — a source of constant frustration for her son.)
In the end, Schultz’s prediction proved correct: sports broke him out of Canarsie. By chance, a Northern Michigan University football scout saw him play and offered him a scholarship. Since it was the only offer Schultz received, the following autumn his parents drove him out to frigid Marquette, Michigan, to become an NMU Wildcat. His col-lege football career lasted less than a week. In one of Schultz’s first practices, a linebacker hit him from his blind side, shattering his jaw and bringing his playing days to a sudden halt. The injury was severe enough that twenty years later, Schultz had to have his jaw rebroken on both sides and his teeth moved because of recurrent dizziness and headaches. Consequently, when Starbucks was spreading across Amer-ica in the early nineties, its leader wore braces. They made Schultz so self-conscious around reporters that some early profiles called him
“timid,” with an “apologetic manner”; a New York Times story from 1994 said of him, “He looks like a well-meaning camp counselor.”
Schultz floated through school without distinguishing himself, and after he graduated in 1975 he found himself adrift. An intense fear of failure made him ambitious, but he had little idea what he wanted to do with himself. At one point, he even considered acting school. Back in New York, he took an unglamorous sales job with Xerox, for $800 a month. From this experience came two lessons that would serve him well in later years at Starbucks: first, that after making fifty cold sales calls a day, often encountering outright hostility, he could handle re-jection; and second, that he was a very good salesman. Schultz par-layed his Xerox job into better and better sales posts, finally landing a vice president position with Hammarplast, a Swedish housewares com-pany, which paid him $75,000 a year, as well as providing a company car and an expense account. He and his soon-to-be wife, an interior de-signer named Sheri Kersch, bought an apartment on the Upper East Side and settled into a comfortable life, spending weekends in the
A Caffeinated Craze
Hamptons. Yet the twenty-eight-year-old Schultz couldn’t muster much passion for kitchen utensils and bird feeders.
In early 1981, Schultz spotted something strange about one Ham-marplast account: a tiny Seattle company called Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spices was placing more orders for a certain kind of drip cof-feemaker than Macy’s. This being well before the meteoric rise of Mi-crosoft and Amazon.com, most East Coasters envisioned Seattle as a remote and rustic place, like Alaska — especially New Yorkers, many of whom still seemed to think that the preferred mode of transportation in the Northwest was the covered wagon. Curious about this account-ing oddity, Schultz decided to fly out to investigate.
The specialty-coffee industry may be packed with misanthropic hippies, but they still enjoy their gossip, and one particularly pervasive rumor about Schultz alleges that he arrived in Seattle with an embar-rassing gift for Jerry Baldwin: a can of supermarket coffee. Baldwin claims it didn’t happen. Still, the Howard Schultz who stepped off the plane that spring day knew next to nothing about coffee; he’d never had much interest in it. That would soon change. After checking into his hotel, Schultz headed for the Pike Place Market Starbucks to try the product, and his recounting of his first fateful sip is a remarkable piece of advertising in itself. The store, he says in his book, “looked like a temple for the worship of coffee.” When a Starbucks employee be-stowed a cup upon him,
The steam and the aroma seemed to envelop my entire face.
There was no question of adding milk or sugar. I took a small, ten-tative sip. Whoa. I threw my head back, and my eyes shot wide open. Even from a single sip, I could tell it was stronger than any coffee I had ever tasted. Seeing my reaction, the Starbucks people laughed. “Is it too much for you?” I grinned and shook my head.
Then I took another sip. This time I could taste more of the full flavors as they slipped over my tongue. By the third sip, I was hooked. I felt as though I had discovered a whole new continent.
Chalk up another epiphany: Schultz was smitten. Before long, the
Chalk up another epiphany: Schultz was smitten. Before long, the