Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This was a small business, but the equity of the brand even back then was much larger than the size of the business. The opportunity that I saw, even when we had four or five stores, was well beyond Portland, Oregon. I was always pushing, we could do so much more, and then the whole thing blew up for me when I went to Italy in 1983. Before the Italy trip, I just want to really contextualize coffee in America. I think coffee has been declining since like 1940. It’s still part of the American culture, but it’s not that it’s on the way out. There’s nothing new or interesting except for this little segment of— Especially coffee, which was tiny. I think what you’ve just described, the reason for that is that coffee was terrible. It was instant coffee, stale coffee, and primarily Robusta beans, which was the low-grade coffee that Starbucks was never involved in.…

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