How Starbucks employees—or partners, as they are called—taste coffee and camaraderie in Seattle
At first glance, the starbucks center in Seattle is a run-of-the-mill building, no different from the average office block found in America’s suburban sprawl. The dull façade is long-standing: Consider that the headquarters of the coffee retail giant once housed a Lowe’s department store. It is inevitably drab, with a huge parking lot, a small foyer and an elevator lobby, tucked away within which is another unremarkable sight in Seattle—a Starbucks store. So far, it is a bit of a let-down. This was the mothership, and I’d expected something more, well, Starbucks-ey.
A minute’s walk later, though, I am quickly forced to revise my knee-jerk impression. I reach the reception area where the unmistakable aroma of coffee from around the world hangs in the air—some chocolatey, some fruity and others tart. The walls are decorated with coffee nostalgia and, as I go further inside, in the middle of the HQ, there are live coffee plants that are watered and nurtured every day. Oh, and then there’s— surprise, surprise—a large Starbucks outlet. Yes, I’ve judged too soon. This was beginning to smell like a fascinating journey into the American coffee mecca.
What could possibly be special about a Starbucks outlet in a Starbucks office? Consider this: Employees stand in long queues and pay for coffee that can be had for free at any of the 24 pantries in the building. No one’s quite sure why they do that. It is yet another vindication of founder-chairman-CEO Howard Schultz’s vision to make Starbucks the third place—the one between home and work— where people congregate for coffee and conversation. At 9.30 am on a weekday, the store is alive with orders ranging from decafs to lattes in all their customised avatars. You would be hard-pressed to find a stronger endorsement of a Starbucks store.
Every morning at nine, there are informal coffee-tasting sessions conducted only for employees (outsiders like me occasionally luck in). On the day I visited, there were about a dozen employees who were given two cups of the same coffee and asked to explain why they tasted as different as they did. After ten minutes of flailing for the right answer, they were told that it was because the French press had not been cleaned properly in one of the cases.
I’m asked to smell the three coffee bags lying in front of me. Each has its own distinct smell—one fruity, the other chocolatey and the third falling somewhere in between. We pour hot water and wait for it to cool. Meanwhile, Major regales me with anecdotes about how he likes his coffee; how many cups he has in a day; why he considers it the best beverage around. He’s also been to India for the launch of the India Estate Blend and considers himself a fan of the coffee. He promises it will be available globally in due course. (Incidentally, Tata Starbucks is trying to inculcate the same coffee-tasting culture among its employees. At their India headquarters in Mumbai’s Lower Parel, employees begin the week with such sessions.)
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)