Howard D. Schultz (born July 19, 1953) is an American businessman and author who was the chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks from 1986 to 2000, and from 2008 to 2017, and interim CEO from 2022 to 2023. Schultz owned the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team from 2001 to 2006.
Schultz began working at Starbucks in 1982. He later left and opened Il Giornale, a specialty coffeeshop that merged with Starbucks during the late 1980s. Under Schultz, the company established a large network of stores which has influenced coffee culture in Seattle, the U.S., and internationally. Following large-scale distribution deals, Starbucks became the largest coffee-house chain in the world. Schultz took the company public in 1992 and used a $271 million valuation to double their store count in a series of highly publicized coffee wars. He stepped down as CEO in 2000, succeeded by Orin Smith. Due to the rapid expansion of Starbucks under Schultz's leadership, he has been described as the “Ray Kroc of his generation”.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Schultz returned as chief executive. Succeeding Jim Donald, Schultz led a mass firing of executives and employees and shuttered hundreds of stores. He orchestrated multiple acquisitions of American and Chinese beverage companies, introduced a national loyalty program, and enforced fair trade standards. His aggressive expansion in Chinese markets has been credited with reconciling the country's tea-culture with coffee consumption in China. Schultz was succeeded by Kevin Johnson as CEO in April 2017 and Myron Ullman as chairman in June 2018.
Schultz has written four books on business. He is an outspoken neoliberal. Schultz publicly considered a candidacy in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 U.S. presidential elections as an independent candidate. He declined to join all three contests. His positions on domestic politics are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. In foreign policy, he is seen as a "liberal hawk", favoring American-led international affairs and neoliberalism. Schultz was named the 209th-richest person in the U.S. by Forbes with a net worth of $4.3 billion (October 2020). Schultz started the Schultz Family Foundation to help military veterans and fight youth unemployment.
On March 16, 2022, Starbucks announced that CEO Kevin Johnson was retiring and that Howard Schultz would take over as interim CEO until Laxman Narasimhan took over as CEO in April 2023. On March 20, 2023, Schultz announced that he would be stepping down early from the position.
Howard D. Schultz was born on July 19, 1953, to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Fred and Elaine Schultz, in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a truck driver, and his mother was a receptionist. Howard has two siblings. Schultz grew up in the Canarsie public housing projects. According to Schultz, his family was poor, although childhood contemporaries recount a middle-class upbringing, with one of his contemporaries referring to the development in which he was raised as "the country club of projects."
Schultz spent his time after school at the Boys Club of New York. He is active in the Boys’ Club of New York's Alumni.
Schultz graduated from Canarsie High School in 1971. He attended Northern Michigan University (NMU) from 1971 to 1975, where he was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, graduating with a B.A. in communications. He had played football, expecting an athletic scholarship but an injury caused him to quit.
In 1976, he became a salesman for Xerox in New York. In 1979, he was recruited by French private equity firm PAI Partners to be general manager of a Swedish kitchenware manufacturer's U.S. subsidiary, Hammarplast. At Hammarplast, Schultz was responsible for the coffee machine manufacturer's U.S. operations, and in 1981 he visited the Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle to fill their plastic cone filter orders.
In 1982, at age 29, Schultz was hired at Starbucks as the director of retail operations and marketing. Schultz was exposed to coffee in Italy on a buying trip to Milan, Italy, in 1983. On his return, he worked to persuade company owners Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker to offer traditional espresso beverages in addition to the whole bean coffee, leaf teas, and spices. After a successful pilot of the cafe concept, Baldwin and Bowker were intrigued but, noting the high cost of espresso machines, the relative paucity of expertise for maintenance and repair of the machines in America, and Americans' lack of familiarity with the drink, they decided not to deploy Schultz's idea further and he stepped down from Starbucks to start his own business. Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open a store of his own. He needed $400,000 to start his business. Schultz visited over 500 espresso bars in Milan and, with him assuming most of the risk associated with introducing espresso to the American market, Starbucks invested $150,000 in the new venture, with Baldwin receiving a place on its board and Bowker offering unofficial assistance. Another $100,000 investment came from local doctor Ron Margolis. Of the 242 investors Schultz approached, 217 rejected his idea. By 1986, he had raised the money he needed to open the first store, Il Giornale, named after the Milanese newspaper of the same name. The store offered ice cream in addition to coffee, had little seating, and played opera music in the background. Two years later, the original Starbucks management team decided to focus on Peet's Coffee & Tea and sold its Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale for US$3.8 million.
Schultz rebranded Il Giornale with the Starbucks name, and expanded its reach across the United States. This type of market strategy received mixed reception from both customers and competitors. The firm's relations with independent coffeehouse chains were strained, while some owners credited Starbucks with educating customers on coffee. Schultz did not believe in franchising, and made a point of having Starbucks retain ownership of every domestic outlet. Schultz's positioning of Starbucks as a social hub is widely seen as introducing the second wave of coffee culture in the U.S., particularly in Seattle. On June 26, 1992, Starbucks had its initial public offering (IPO) and trading of its common stock under the stock ticker SBUX. The IPO raised $271 million for the company and financed the doubling of their stores. On June 1, 2000, Schultz stepped down as CEO of Starbucks, moving to the new position of chief global strategist to help the company expand internationally. He was succeeded by Orin Smith, who worked with Schultz as his chief financial officer during the 1990s. After coordinating the first store opening in China in January 1999, Schultz took the following year to develop a customer base for coffee in the region. Throughout the late-2000s and early-2010s, Schultz directed the company to plan one to two store openings a day in mainland China. Back in the firm's U.S. market, various coffee wars with McDonalds and Dunkin' lowered Starbucks' marketshare and the stock price fell 75% from 2006 to 2008. While revenue was growing broadly, it was largely dependent on new store openings creating unsustainable (or inorganic) growth.
On January 7, 2008, after an eight-year hiatus, Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. He succeeded Jim Donald who took over from Smith in 2005. The coffeehouse was increasingly criticized for employee work conditions and their internal tipping policies during this time; in March 2009, he and the board approved a $100 million settlement in back tips in a barista-led class action lawsuit in California. He led a mass-firing of executives, closed down hundreds of stores, and temporarily closed all U.S. locations to retrain employees in making espresso. Schultz redoubled and enforced the firm's fair trade and ethical source policies for their coffee bean supply-chain in Africa and other coffee-producing countries. In the succeeding two years, he doubled their annual purchase of fair trade coffee, up to, by some estimates, 40 million pounds. Schultz arranged the appointment of the coffeehouse's first chief technology officer. At this time, Schultz was earning a total compensation of $9.7 million, which included a base salary of $1.2 million, and stock options granted of $7.8 million. In addition to his board membership with Starbucks, Schultz was an early and significant stakeholder in Jamba Juice in 2011, and on the board of payment processing company, Square, Inc., until 2014. During the summer of 2014, Schultz launched the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, a partnership with Arizona State University, which allows all employees at Starbucks working 20 or more hours a week to qualify for free tuition through ASU's online courses. It was reported in 2018 that Schultz had taken a one-dollar annual salary sometime in the past couple of years.