More Trouble at Howard Schultz' Starbucks

Monday's Wall Street Journal provided some additional information regarding Howard Schultz's attempt to revive the firm he founded, Starbucks.

In this recent post addressing returning CEOs, I wrote,

"In Dell's and Starbuck's cases, I question if they ever will (return to consistently superior total return performance). I believe, for reasons I've discussed in labeled posts on both CEOs and their companies, that competition, growth and simple Schumpeterian dynamics have worked to end their time of consistent outperformance."

I still feel that way. The nearby Yahoo-sourced price chart of the coffee seller and the S&P500 Index for the past five years portrays a brand that has run its course.

Typically, a firm once successful at earning consistently superior total returns will fade from either: lack of growth opportunities; competition; regulation, or; investor expectations finally catching up with performance.

Ironically, as I noted in this post, Schultz had been alleging competition had nothing to do with the firm's slumping fortunes,

Perhaps the most amazing comment Schultz uttered in the rather surreal interview this morning on CNBC was, in response to Bartiromo's question about McDonald's,

'Competition- they're just noise,'or words very close to those.

Well, as I noted in this post, regarding Schultz's recent, hand-picked strategist, Michelle Gass, contended,

"She says she hasn't been focused on competitors in developing the new plans. "I think we'd all readily admit that a lot of the situation we're in is self-induced." Sounds familiar, right? At least Gass and Schultz are reading from the same page in the same playbook.

But in that prior post, I went on to note,

"Thus, I find Ms. Gass' comment to be dangerously short-sighted and internally-focused.

Instead, she might wake up to the reality of Schumpeterian dynamics. Between Starbucks' own prior expansion into lower-income segments, and McDonalds' search for growth in kindred products, the former's market dominance was almost certainly going to come to an end, one way or another.

As it is, Starbucks is being bracketed by another coffee retailer on one side, and a fast-food giant on the other. This has less to do with Starbucks' 'self-induced' troubles than it does with recent targeting of the coffee giant's business by two very large, savvy food retailers.

I hope, for Howard Schultz' and Starbucks' sake, that Ms. Gass begins to become aware of this reality."

In this week's Journal piece, however, it reported,

"Reflecting his urgency, Mr. Schultz told workers he no longer wanted to hear about projects that would take as long as 18 months. "We have to defend our position," he said to a few hundred employees shortly after the March annual meeting. "We have lots of companies small and large who want to take a piece of our business away."

Wow. That's some fast reversal of strategic diagnosis, isn't it?

But what is truly disturbing is how personally Schultz is taking Starbuck's natural decline. As the Journal article describes,

But early last year, Starbucks seemed to be losing its edge, a complaint Mr. Schultz himself voiced in a leaked memo. It wasn't setting the agenda with new products but just adding drink flavors and ordinary items like breakfast sandwiches. Stores had grown cluttered with stuffed animals and other noncoffee items. Price boosts were starting to annoy customers.

"I was just depressed," Mr. Schultz says. He launched a personal turnaround routine, consisting of what are now six gym workouts a week and a daily health shake of fruit and cottage cheese.

In public, he appeared humbled. At the annual meeting in March, Mr. Schultz told the crowd to stop applauding when he walked on stage. "I thought I could start crying," he says.

Schultz is so personally invested in the attempt to reverse the age-old forces of Schumpeterian dynamics that he seems to simply deny their existence.

The article cites, through the recounting of many examples, how Schultz has gathered to himself the power to make even the most trivial decisions. It's reminiscent of Steve Jobs, with one big difference.

Jobs' Apple is in a business which creates new products. The best Schultz can now do, having already created a modern version of the old, original Dutch coffee house, is to introduce some marginal new beverage flavors each year.

Hardly the same thing.

It seems to me that people spend a certain amount of money on coffee and beverage purchases at places like Starbucks. Once the firm has penetrated sufficient markets, as I noted in this post, it really has little room for growth. Perhaps growing economies such as India and China provide some opportunities. But if that were all that was needed, the company would have already been growing with those countries' own growth rates.

No, it seems the problems for Starbucks lie more in the realm of simply having been successful long enough to have attracted competition while saturating its primary and secondary market segments.

I doubt Schultz' micromanagement of the firm he created will really change those facts.

But, as always, time will tell.