Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
58 published records
01 / belief
“I think I saw some research that said that it’s sub-1% of someone’s household income and often far less than that.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what he was doing in Seattle, but I spent a fair amount of time with him and his son.”
03 / belief
“I think the other piece that you didn’t just list off there that we’ve covered in depth is the Costco investment in your employees, the people, and the reduction of turnover.”
04 / evaluation
“Most of those types of concepts do not work in different countries and continents.”
05 / belief
“Part of it’s coming out of the pandemic, but I think anybody who tuned into the last earnings call is wondering what’s up with the future of this company.”
06 / belief
“When I think about the most important thing we probably have done in the last 20 years, it’s been the unique relationship that we established with Arizona State University and its President Michael Crow.”
07 / commitment
“When she said to me, I will do it if I’m in control of everything, I want to decentralize China.”
08 / uncertainty
“Do you realize you own this space in Cordusio Square, it used to be a post office? He said, I don’t know.”
09 / belief
“I think my personal relationship with the company and how personal it is to me, and the things that we, not I, but we have tried to do to build a different company when the country started moving in a post-COVID era to a direction that I didn’t recognize, very, very hard to understand why Starbucks would be under assault or just being challenged this way.”
10 / belief
“I think I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Kids were getting older. I had missed a lot.”
11 / belief
“I think one thing that’s always been missed is that Starbucks has always been a great first job.”
12 / belief
“There was tremendous pressure inside the company to closed China. Until Belinda Wong, maybe the most valuable person in the company from my view.”
13 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if she ever had a conversation with her father—I’m sure she did—but the whole thing could have been over.”
14 / belief
“I think you ended up doing $93 million that year, but the year before was $50 million or something like that.”
15 / belief
“I think the numbers are—it was a little bit after IPO in 1994—$23 million. They had 23 locations and they were doing $16 million a year in revenue.”
16 / belief
“I think World War II and the GIs were the impetus for that quality coffee, or not quality coffee to exist and have any run after the war.”
17 / evaluation
“The way that it looks to me from the outside—and you can tell me if this is right—you were the vision and ambition that would almost take any ambition that anybody else had and force them to think bigger and faster.”
18 / belief
“We just need a lot of beans, and we need to ground them up and create this instant product. I believe Maxwell House was involved in inventing.”
19 / belief
“Before the Italy trip, I just want to really contextualize coffee in America. I think coffee has been declining since like 1940.”
20 / belief
“I think what you’ve just described, the reason for that is that coffee was terrible.”
21 / belief
“Let’s just go back, not to the economics but the idea itself, and I think whether we talked about bottled Frappuccino, the cup, you just thread all these things.”
22 / belief
“We walk out, and walking around I think we probably went to Columbia Center to get a coffee and come back.”
23 / uncertainty
“United Airlines was paying you for coffee, I assume. I don’t know exactly how the thing went down.”
24 / belief
“I think your question is steeped in one is a commoditized environment, and the other clearly is not.”
25 / belief
“Humanity, and it’s universal. But it’s so (I think) important to just create some guardrails.”
26 / uncertainty
“Jeff and Jim took me to a parking lot in Kirkland when I said, I don’t know if we can do this.”
27 / belief
“Thank you very much. I think Starbucks is so resilient. Starbucks has had many, many challenges.”
28 / belief
“I think there was a future meeting scheduled for Starbucks and Apple around mobile order and pay and other things.”
29 / belief
“Not bean companies, not retailers, not coffee house chains, truly unheard of. So when you’re going on this road show, I think people of course are mystified.”
30 / belief
“We went out at $17 and the price was $21. The market cap (I think) was $250 million.”
31 / commitment
“Howard Behar should be credited with so much of the cultural texture and the tapestry of the humanity of the company. Said, I will go to Chicago and fix it.”
32 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what our cost of customer acquisition was back then, but it was low.”
33 / belief
“I think the Starbucks barista deserves so much credit because they are dealing with so many different variations of beverages, some of which they’re making for the first time on the fly.”
34 / belief
“When he kept saying I don’t want to do this anymore, I was stuck because I was not prepared to look around the room and say, God, I think he could do it.”
35 / belief
“Healthcare, I think 25 years before the Affordable Care Act, what we did with Comprehensive Health Insurance.”
36 / belief
“While we’re in technology land, I think today 33% of Starbucks orders are done with mobile order and pay.”
37 / belief
“I think there’s a burden that the organization has and a reliance on the founder that over time can become unhealthy.”
38 / belief
“I think the pricing of Starbucks was directly linked to the economic model that I alluded to earlier, and the rising costs of labor, rent, and the fiduciary responsibility that we all felt to achieving the promise we had to our shareholders.”
39 / belief
“In 1988, the health benefits roll out even to part-time employees, including gay couples in domestic partnerships, I believe the first of its kind, that was a 33-store company at that point.”
40 / belief
“I don’t think people knew what I was even doing. I think maybe a few people. I just had the thought we got to put this in a bottle.”
41 / uncertainty
“Someone at Starbucks, I don’t know who it was, started writing names on the cup, and it just became standard.”
42 / belief
“Yeah, that’s what happened. And because coffee has a shelf life of basically a week to 10 days, and we didn’t have a vacuum bag at that time, we were shipping small amounts because to Jerry Baldwin’s credit, he had such a fastidious point of view about quality and freshness, and I think that had a huge impact on me.”
43 / uncertainty
“I don’t know any other business in which the incrementality of the price has been dictated by the consumer.”
44 / belief
“I don’t think anything would’ve been executed like Starbucks. But I think someone would have showed up.”
45 / belief
“I think what’s lost in all this is the percentage of stores that have been petitioned, and the number of people is very small in relationship to the whole.”
46 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that’s something Starbucks created, I don’t know if that’s something inherent to the product, I don’t know if that’s because it has this Italian lineage, but there’s all these incredible benefits that Starbucks and any other coffee house chains get to enjoy because it’s respected to do that work.”
47 / commitment
“Jerry says, Starbucks does not want to open up coffee bars, but we will invest in Il Giornale.”
48 / belief
“I think we only had a couple of quarters of profitability and I think we had about 130 stores.”
49 / evaluation
“I think for me as a business historian, that’s been the thing that jumps out is there’s no other company that we’ve studied that has this obsession with people in humanity the way that Starbucks does.”
50 / evaluation
“Now, if we fast forward—I don’t know if you want to do that here on what it’s become—it is the biggest Achilles heel for Starbucks.”
51 / evaluation
“I think that the reason you picked DC was because your mail order business was strong there.”
52 / commitment
“A lawyer, I think Scott Greenberg at the time came to me and said, we can’t do this unless we get approval from the SEC because we were over 500 shareholders.”
53 / preference
“We had to tread very lightly after the acquisition because of the loyalty, be careful with the name, solicit George’s help and advice.”
54 / evaluation
“People in California loved it. There’s a fantastic story about Frappuccino because of what we did with it.”
55 / preference
“We were not expanding to multiple markets until we had enough evidence in the existing market that we had success, and we weren’t going to compound the growth in another market with problems that we’re having in the existing one. And I think that’s all Behar, because was managing all the operations.”
56 / prediction
“We are on top of something that is going to change—you don’t say the world—America, and this thing can become America’s coffee house. It was interesting because I think the whole room was already scared of your ambition of going nationwide with this thing that there did not exist another example of a national coffee house chain.”
57 / preference
“I started taking a couple of trips to Europe and Asia just to get a sense of what the opportunity would be and how would we do it.”
58 / evaluation
“As a result, tens of thousands of stores have followed in our wake, and we created an employment industry that did not exist.”