Starbucks

"There are a few splendid principles. For instance, if you let people at least make a start on the process, they mind waiting less. If Starbucks let me place your order when you walked in — ie at the back of the queue — I wouldn’t mind waiting for my coffee nearly so much — what I find really annoying is waiting to tell them what I want. A second principle: people dislike waiting much more when the length of the delay is uncertain. Tell them an expected wait time and (as the London underground discovered) people are much less paranoid about any delay."

"Besides, Mahe wasn’t a threat to anybody. Cupertino concluded it was best just to leave her in a cushy role. When she tried to establish a media presence for herself, she wasn’t allowed to, so she sought out other work to create her image in other ways. She joined the board of Starbucks in 2019 and Lululemon in 2022, and now serves as a governor of the China division of the American Chamber of Commerce. To outsiders, these positions have made her look like a rock star. *Fortune* has repeatedly named Mahe to its “Most Powerful Women” lists. And in the rare instances she’s mentioned in the media, reporters make the natural assumption that Apple’s success in China is somehow reflective of her leadership. The company’s secretive, insular culture has masked the reality that she’s been playing a largely ceremonial role."

"In 1996, his favourite ‘Jeffism’ was Get Big Fast. The company that got the lead in online book retailing would probably keep it, would have the lowest unit costs and prices, the most customers, and could offer them even better service, and then move into other categories. But ‘when you are small,’ he warned, ‘someone bigger can always come along and take away what you have’.1 So he told Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, ‘We are going to take this thing to the moon.’"

"A while before this announcement, an Apple representative inquired, “Will the store be open on January 9th?” After telling them we were on holiday, there was no further discussion, so I paid it no mind. But while watching TV that night, I couldn’t help but exclaim aloud. The presentation on that day in which Steve declared, “We are reinventing the phone,” featured a famous scene where he prank-called Starbucks asking for “1,000 lattes,” but there was this exchange as well. In the part introducing the iPhone’s messaging function, Steve demonstrated arranging dinner with Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Marketing. The place they discussed heading to was some Japanese restaurant in the suburbs of San Francisco. The unvarnished feeling upon seeing this scene was (Oh no). The recent inquiry was probably for this reason. Soon after, I heard that a certain store was buzzing with the “Steve special demand.” Since they imprinted “Thank you, Steve” on the receipts, they must have benefited considerably. (If I had known, I would have ended my vacation a day early…) I thought, but it was too late. It might be considered trivial, but such PR is crucial in intense competition. However, after some time, I also started to think like this: (Perhaps Steve didn’t want to reveal his real favorite place). The store tried not to pay too much attention to Steve and basically treated him as one of the regular customers. Steve also frequented the place probably because he liked this kind of treatment."

"We understood that people don’t go out just to eat; they also select restaurants in order to be part of a community experience. Starbucks took the notion of drinking good coffee (and standing in line to buy it) and figured out how to make the experience of drinking coffee with a community of other like-minded people become the real star of the show. The company also learned to superimpose its blueprint onto thousands of locations north, south, east, and west, while also conveying the sense that each Starbucks belonged to its particular community. It was brilliant entrepreneurship to grasp that selling excellent coffee is secondary to creating a sense of community."