If the only person who soothed you during Monday's stock-market chaos was an extra-friendly Starbucks barista, thank Howard Schultz. In a flowery memo to the chain's 190,000 employees (called "partners" in Starbucks lingo), the coffee giant's billionaire chairman and chief executive told baristas to be especially sensitive to the customers asking them for a cup of coffee.
"Today's financial market volatility, combined with great political uncertainty both at home and abroad, will undoubtedly have an effect on consumer confidence and ... our customers are likely to experience an increased level of anxiety and concern," Schultz wrote in his "Message from Howard" morning email, which Starbucks provided to the Washington Post.
"Please recognize this and - as you always have - remember that our success is not an entitlement, but something we need to earn, every day," Schultz continued. "Let's be very sensitive to the pressures our customers may be feeling, and do everything we can to individually and collectively exceed their expectations."
Schultz, 62, has long been a believer in the greater social good achievable at the cappuccino machine. He was the driving force behind Starbucks' ridiculed "Race Together" campaign, which encouraged baristas to write the phrase on cups while talking with customers about America's racial tensions. That campaign was an outgrowth of the chain's 2012 "Come Together" campaign, designed to urge lawmakers to avoid the fiscal cliff.
The free-spirited social pushes have helped cement Schultz as one of the more outspoken - and, as critics say, tone-deaf - executives in corporate America's typically taciturn upper ranks. In 2006, the Brooklyn-born billionaire told "60 Minutes," "We're not in the business of filling bellies. We're in the business of filling souls."