Yet Again Yet Again One Rule for Herr Schultz

Starbucks President and Principal Executive Officeholder Kevin Johnson speaks at the Annual Coming together of Shareholders in Seattle, Washington on March 20, 2019. The company appear his difference just hours before the 2022 shareholders meeting. Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images hibernate caption

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Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Starbucks President and Principal Executive Officer Kevin Johnson speaks at the Annual Coming together of Shareholders in Seattle, Washington on March 20, 2019. The company announced his divergence only hours before the 2022 shareholders coming together.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

Amid the peachy resignation, a big one.

Starbucks has announced that its president and CEO Kevin Johnson is retiring later on xiii years with the company, five of them as CEO. He leaves April 4.

The announcement came but hours earlier the company's almanac shareholder meeting. Howard Schultz, who led Starbucks for three decades and built the visitor from 11 stores and 100 employees to 28,000 stores worldwide, volition return every bit interim CEO. He is taking on the position as a volunteer, the visitor said, with compensation of $1.

The Starbucks Board of Directors thanked Johnson for his leadership, citing the challenges brought on by the pandemic, which it called "one of the almost difficult periods in mod history."

In a statement, Johnson, 61, indicated his departure was planned, noting he had signaled to the Starbucks lath a twelvemonth ago that he would consider retiring as the pandemic came to an end.

"I feel this is a natural bookend to my thirteen years with the company," he said.

After an initial plunge in the very early days of the pandemic, Starbucks shares began a steady recovery in mid-2020 and soared to a tape loftier concluding summer. Even as restaurants struggled, coffee sales were strong, in function thanks to Starbucks' bulldoze-throughs. By jump of 2021, the company said U.S. sales had fabricated a "full recovery."

Simply Starbucks has not been able to slow a grassroots unionization drive that took off in Buffalo, New York, last twelvemonth. In December, 2 out of three stores voted to bring together Workers United, affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, becoming the starting time Starbucks stores in the U.S. to form unions. Since then, four more than stores — one in Mesa, Arizona, and three others in the Buffalo area — have joined them, and more than than 130 other locations have petitioned for matrimony votes.

On Tuesday, the National Labor Relations Board issued a formal complaint against Starbucks, alleging the company took retaliatory actions against ii Arizona employees who were part of the union campaign.

At the shareholder meeting on Wednesday, Lath Chair Mellody Hobson addressed the unionization efforts in her opening remarks.

"We hear the feedback, and we are committed to finding new ways to enhance and elevate what we call the partner feel," she said. "Nosotros truly believe the company has and tin continue to deliver far more in direct partnership with our people."

Schultz's return to Starbucks at this moment makes sense to those who have followed him closely.

"It's in his claret, and it's personal for him," says Harvard Concern School historian Nancy Koehn, who first wrote about Schultz in 1996.

Koehn expects Schultz volition set up listening sessions with employees, to understand what's happening at the store level every bit well equally the broader priorities of working Americans.

Howard Schultz sips coffee in Chongqing, China, in 2006. Schultz, who grew Starbucks into the global brand it is today, returns to the company as interim CEO after Kevin Johnson's departure. China Photos/Getty Images hide caption

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China Photos/Getty Images

Howard Schultz sips java in Chongqing, China, in 2006. Schultz, who grew Starbucks into the global brand it is today, returns to the company equally interim CEO after Kevin Johnson's difference.

Communist china Photos/Getty Images

"Howard has an uncanny and I think unusually strong ability to sympathise the zeitgeist of a detail moment — socially, politically, psychically, economically," she says.

Schultz, who led Starbucks from 1987 until 2018, said in a statement he had non planned to render to Starbucks merely knows the company is at a point where information technology must transform once more.

"Our success is non an entitlement," he said. "Nosotros must continue to earn the trust of our people and our customers every day."

In Buffalo on Wednesday, Jaz Brisack, a barista at the start Starbucks location to unionize, decried what she described as Starbucks' spousal relationship-busting activities, including by Schultz himself.

Schultz spoke at an employee event in Buffalo just days before the union vote last fall and issued an open letter of the alphabet to all Starbucks employees.

"No partner has ever needed to have a representative seek to obtain things we all have as partners at Starbucks," he wrote on November 6, 2021. "I am saddened and concerned to hear anyone thinks that is needed now."

Brisack says that upon his return she expects Schultz to repeat the same message he told workers in Buffalo. "That information technology's nigh an insult to him personally for united states to endeavour to unionize, which nosotros've fabricated clear from solar day one — this isn't a criticism. Information technology'due south actually a way for the states to grow with the company and claiming the status quo."

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/16/1086861186/starbucks-ceo-is-stepping-down-howard-schultz-returning-as-interim-boss