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Many layers go into eliciting such an emotional response. Starbucks is intensely personal. Aside from brushing their teeth, what else do so many people do habitually every day? They drink coffee. Same time. Same store. Same beverage. There's aspecial relationship millions have developed with our brand, our people, our stores, and our coffee. Preserving that relationship is an honorable but enormous responsibility.
     
    In 2006, as I visited hundreds of Starbucks stores in cities around the world, the entrepreneurial merchant in me sensed something intrinsic to Starbucks’ brand was missing. An aura. A spirit. At first I couldn't put my finger on it. No one thing was sapping the stores of a certain soul. Rather, the unintended consequences resulting from the absence of several things that had distinguished our brand were, I feared, silently deflating it.
     
    In the memo, I spelled out my concerns.
     
    New espresso machines that we had installed in stores, while effectively increasing efficiency, were too tall. This unforeseen barrier prevented customers on one side of the coffee bar from watching baristas on the other side create their beverages. The height also kept baristas from engaging with customers in the same manner that had enchanted me back in Milan. I expressed this concern in the memo:
     
When we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time, we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theater that was in play. . . .
     
    Also in stores, the full-bodied, suggestive, rich aroma of freshly ground coffee had become weak to nonexistent, due in large part to how we shipped and stored coffee grounds. Without it, Starbucks lost a way to tell a story that transported customers out of their day to far-flung places like Costa Rica and Africa. Ever since I had been with the company, we had banned smoking and asked partners not to wear perfume or cologne to preserve the coffee aroma. It is perhaps the most sensory aspect of our brand, and it reinforces the core of who we are: purveyors of the world's highest-quality coffees. Again, I articulated this in the memo:
     
We achieved fresh roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma—perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage.
     
    Finally, the stores’ design, so critical to atmosphere, seemed to lack the warm, cozy feeling of a neighborhood gathering place. Some people called our interior spaces cookie-cutter or sterile:
     
Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale . . . [but] one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past. . . .
     
    Without these sensory triggers, something about visiting a Starbucks vanished. The unique sights, smells, and charms that Starbucks introduced into the marketplace define our brand. If coffee and people are our core, the overall experience is our soul.
     
    “We desperately need to . . . get back to the core and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks Experience,” I wrote, adding that competitors of all kinds were breathing down our necks.
     
    I could not allow us, or myself, to drift into a sea of mediocrity after so many years of hard work. I just could not do it. The time had come to speak up, from the heart:
     
I have said for 20 years that our success is not an entitlement and now it's proving to be a reality. . . . Let's get back to the core. Push for innovation and do the things necessary to once again differentiate Starbucks from all others. We have an enormous responsibility to both the people who have come before us. . . . our partners and their families who are relying on our