A HOT, STEAMING CUP OF CUSTOMER AWARENESS.

The article discusses how entrepreneur Howard Schultz made Starbucks popular after buying the company in 1987. Schultz, who bought Starbucks in 1987 when it was a tiny Seattle roastery, loves nothing more than talking about the importance of a finely tuned "customer experience." Managing that experience is no small matter: Starbucks has 8,500 stores and 90,000 employees, and has made macchiatos ubiquitous from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Bangkok. Frappuccino was created by a store manager in West L.A. This person was fooling around one day in our store, blending beverages with a blender she bought on her own. We started sampling that, and the people in our Southern California region were very intrigued. We tested it, named it, and Frappuccino today is a multi-hundred-million-dollar business in our stores. There are so many unique ideas coming to the company from both inside and out, it would be an injustice to link this only to me. Starbucks was the first company in America to give comprehensive health benefits and stock options to every single employee, including the over 65% that were part-time at the time. Starbucks has the lowest level of attrition of any national retailer. These are things that are below the surface, but threaded into the external innovation that we're talking about.