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product the way Jerry talked about coffee. He wasn’t calculating how to maximize sales; he was providing people with something he believed they ought to enjoy. It was an approach to business, and to selling, that was as fresh and novel to me as the Starbucks coffee we were drinking.
    “Tell me about the roast,” I said. “Why is it so important to roast it dark?”
    That roast, Jerry told me, was what differentiated Starbucks. Alfred Peet had pounded into them a strong belief that the dark roast brought out the full flavors of coffee.
    The best coffees are all arabicas, Jerry explained, especially those grown high in the mountains. The cheap robusta coffees used in supermarket blends cannot be subjected to the dark roasting process, which will just burn them. But the finest arabicas can withstand the heat, and the darker the beans are roasted, the fuller the flavor.
    The packaged food companies prefer a light roast because it allows a higher yield. The longer coffee is roasted, the more weight it loses. The big roasters agonize over a tenth or a half of a percent difference in shrinkage. The lighter the roast, the more money they save. But Starbucks cares more about flavor than about yields.
    From the beginning, Starbucks stayed exclusively with the dark roast. Jerry and Gordon tweaked Alfred Peet’s roasting style and came up with a very similar version, which they called the Full City Roast (now called the Starbucks roast).
    Jerry picked up a bottle of beer, a Guinness. Comparing the Full City Roast of coffee to your standard cup of canned supermarket coffee, he explained, is like comparing Guinness beer to Budweiser. Most Americans drink light beers like Budweiser. But once you learn to love dark, flavorful beers like Guinness, you can never go back to Bud.
    Although Jerry didn’t discuss marketing plans or sales strategies, I was beginning to realize he had a business philosophy the likes of which I had never encountered.
    First, every company must stand for something. Starbucks stood not only for good coffee, but specifically for the dark-roasted flavor profile that the founders were passionate about. That’s what differentiated it and made it authentic.
    Second, you don’t just give the customers what they ask for. If you offer them something they’re not accustomed to, something so far superior that it takes a while to develop their palates, you can create a sense of discovery and excitement and loyalty that will bond them to you. It may take longer, but if you have a great product, you can educate your customers to like it rather than kowtowing to mass-market appeal.
    Starbucks’ founders understood a fundamental truth about selling: To mean something to customers, you should assume intelligence and sophistication and inform those who are eager to learn. If you do, what may seem to be a niche market could very well appeal to far more people than you imagine.
    I wasn’t smart enough to comprehend all of this that first day I discovered Starbucks. It took years for these lessons to sink in.
    Although Starbucks has grown enormously since those days, product quality is still at the top of the mission statement. But every so often, when executive decision making gets tough, when corporate bureaucratic thinking starts to prevail, I pay a visit to that first store in Pike Place Market. I run my hand over the worn wooden counters. I grab a fistful of dark-roasted beans and let them sift through my fingers, leaving a thin, fragrant coating of oil. I keep reminding myself and others around me that we have a responsibility to those who came before.
    We can innovate, we can reinvent almost every aspect of the business except one: Starbucks will always sell the highest quality fresh-roasted whole-bean coffee. That’s our legacy.
    On the five-hour plane trip back to New York the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about Starbucks. It was like a shining jewel. I took one sip of the watery airline coffee and pushed it