Howie Schultz is Back in at Starbucks

As we sit sipping a burnt-tasting tall latte from the Tully's down at Union Station, we're mulling over the news that Starbucks' founder Howie Schultz is back in the driver's seat. Apparently, Jim Donald--CEO since March '05--just couldn't cut it. Admittedly, the market hasn't been kind to America's biggest specialty coffee chain--check out that falling graph over at the NY Times.

Interestingly, for those Starbucks Corp. watchers out there, we're again hearing noise about the "customer experience" and working with their "associates" (read: baristas) to improve on it. As Fox News puts it:

Schultz stated that his agenda will include...improving the current state of the U.S. business by refocusing on the customer experience in the stores, new products and store design elements, and new training and tools for the Company's store partners to help them give customers a superior experience...

Over at Starbucks Gossip, there's not much in the way of comment from the author other than noting the the change at the helm. A bit too early to make sense of the move, perhaps. But if the readership is any indication, the move's popular. "Uncle Howie to the rescue!" trumpets someone from Boston.

For all the enthusiasm, we're not going to hold our breaths for any real improvements. "Improvement" for Starbucks is no doubt a top-down effort to force wage-slaves to be a bit nicer to customers (and "Upsell! Upsell! Upsell!"). Starbucks Gossip readers have been begging for a substantial rethinking of Starbucks' core business values (witness the widespread enthusiasm over a supposed memo leaked from Schultz's office) for a while, to re-focus on quality and customer service. And we agree; but somehow, we doubt they're going to bring back the La Marzocco machines any time soon.

And Schultz isn't exactly a hero here in Seattle. He may be a business superstar, but he's also the guy who sold the Sonics to right-wing, anti-gay, anti-environment fundies because we didn't throw a couple hundred million in corporate welfare his way. So thanks but no thanks, Howie--given the choice down here at U.S., we're gonna keep hitting the Tully's. Let's just call it a "Thanks to you too, buddy" sorta thing.

Thanks to awungfoo for being cool enough to submit the pic of Starbucks HQ to the Seattlest Flickr pool.