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Here's an interesting read by Joe Nocera. Keep in mind he wrote this for the New York Times in January of this year.

This piece is actually from the International Herald Tribune - which is owned by the NYT and is now called "Global Edition of The New York Times" on the masthead.


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An open letter to the founder of Starbucks

By Joe Nocera

Saturday, January 12, 2008


To: Howard Schultz

From: Joe Nocera

Re: Your, er, return

Dear Howard,

It's been almost a year since you wrote that now-famous memo to your executive staff: the one in which you bemoaned what you called "the watering down of the Starbucks experience." The one where you defended each individual decision that had led to that diminished experience - like the switch to automated espresso machines - yet still urged your staff to find a way to recapture the "romance and theater."

Starbucks stores, you wrote, "no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store." As a hard-core Starbucks customer, I couldn't have agreed more.

What has happened since then? In 2007, Starbucks expanded by an astonishing 1,700 stores - hardly the path a company takes if it's serious about recapturing its "soul." You're now up to 15,000 stores, and from what I read (alas, I couldn't get you on the telephone this week), you still think you can someday get to 40,000 stores - a number that no one, not even McDonald's, has ever come close to. How do you train enough people to staff 40,000 stores? How do you maintain quality? How do you keep your 40,000 stores from becoming just another nondescript chain?

The rest........
An open letter to the founder of Starbucks - International Herald Tribune

So, according to this editorial.....Starbucks opened 1,700 stores in 2007 alone. By closing 600 of them, they only expanded by 1,100 stores in 2007!!
That puts the closing in perspective.