Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz was born July 19, 1953, in Brooklyn, and grew up in the Bayview Houses public housing project in Canarsie. When he was seven, his father, a diaper-delivery driver, broke his ankle and lost the job on the spot, with no sick pay, no disability assistance and no health insurance, and the family went hungry for months. Schultz cited that memory for the rest of his career as the reason he built health coverage into a company most of his industry treated as unskilled retail work. A football scholarship got him out of Canarsie and into Northern Michigan University, where a knee injury ended his playing days. He graduated in 1975 with a communications degree, no clear plan, and a job selling typewriters for Xerox.

Schultz joined Starbucks, then a single Seattle store selling beans and equipment, in 1982 as director of retail operations. A buying trip to Milan a year later showed him Italian espresso bars, and when the founders balked at serving drinks rather than beans, he quit and opened his own coffeehouse chain, Il Giornale, after more than 200 investors turned him down. In 1987 he bought Starbucks and merged it into his own company, keeping the name. He took it public in 1992 and expanded it into thousands of stores, adding health insurance and stock grants for part-time baristas along the way. He left as chief executive in 2000, returned during the 2008 financial crisis to save the company from its own overexpansion, and stepped back in for a third stint in 2022 as workers began unionizing stores nationwide.

The health-insurance-for-baristas story sits uneasily beside what happened when Starbucks workers tried to organize. Beginning in 2021, employees at stores across the country began voting to unionize, and the company responded by firing organizers, closing unionized locations and delaying contract talks for years. In 2023, a National Labor Relations Board judge found the company had committed hundreds of violations of federal labor law, calling the conduct egregious and widespread. Senator Bernie Sanders called Schultz before a Senate committee that year and asked directly whether Starbucks had broken the law. Schultz said he did not believe it had. The man whose origin story turned on what happened to his father when an employer offered no protection spent his last years in charge fighting the one protection his own baristas were trying to win.

Schultz explored running for president three times, in 2012, 2016 and 2020, and each time the idea drew more criticism than support, Democrats especially fearing an independent run would hand the election to Donald Trump. He dropped the idea for good and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. By 2022 Starbucks' market value had grown roughly a hundred billion dollars under the tenures he led, and net worth estimates put him near four billion dollars personally. Whether he is remembered chiefly as the man who normalized the coffeehouse as public space or as the billionaire who fought his own employees' union drive is not decided yet, and depends heavily on how the labor cases still working through the courts come out.

Howard Schultz's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Il Giornale company
  His own espresso-bar chain, later merged into Starbucks 1986
• Starbucks Corporation company
  Bought the original Seattle roaster and built it into a global chain 1987
• Pour Your Heart Into It book
  His first book, on building Starbucks 1997
• Onward book
  Account of his 2008 return and the company's turnaround 2011
• Seattle SuperSonics ownership other
  Owned the NBA team before selling it to Oklahoma City buyers in 2006 2001

• July 19, 1953 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 1960 aged ~7 His father breaks his ankle and loses his job with no benefits
• 1975 aged ~22 Graduates Northern Michigan University
• 1982 aged ~29 Joins Starbucks as director of retail operations
• 1986 aged ~33 Leaves to found Il Giornale after a Milan espresso-bar trip
• 1987 aged ~34 Buys Starbucks and merges it with Il Giornale
• 1992 aged ~39 Takes Starbucks public
• 2008 aged ~55 Returns as CEO during the financial crisis
• March 2023 aged 69 Testifies before the Senate on Starbucks' labor practices

• Ray Kroc 1902–1984
  Businessman who transformed McDonald's from a single restaurant into the world's largest fast-food chain. compared to
• Bernie Sanders b. 1941
  Vermont senator whose presidential campaigns moved single-payer health care into mainstream debate. questioned by
• Joe Biden b. 1942
  46th president who enacted major infrastructure and climate legislation after decades in the Senate and vice presidency. endorsed
• Phil Knight b. 1938
  Co-founder of Nike whose sneaker empire made him one of the wealthiest people in America. contemporary