that People are crucial to ensuring that the company delivers the Starbucks Experience every day. Starbucks is attempting to plant its values in the company culture to give employees a sense of meaning to their work even if it is just pouring a cup of coffee. Starbucks’s ongoing commitment to providing a great work environment has also had many positive impacts on partners and customers. To ensure that partners share in Starbucks success, they are provided stock option grants to eligible partners under the Bean Stock Plan for the 10th consecutive year, 401K option is also available.Starbucks' has a strong management team, hiring people with extensive experience in managing and expanding retail chains. The four key executives during the company's formative years—Howard Schultz, Dave Olsen, Howard Behar, and Orin Smith—contributed the most to defining and shaping the company's values, principles, and culture. Shultz added people experience growing a retail chain, capable of adding valuable perspectives to the board of directors.Store personnel is put through intense 24 hour training session before entering the store. Classes include: coffee history, drink preparation, coffee knowledge (four hours), customer service (four hours), and retail skills, plus a four-hour workshop called "Brewing the Perfect Cup."When stores are open in a new markets, recruiting efforts are undertaken 10 weeks prior to opening, experienced teams of managers and sales were sent to location to assist training on one-to one basis.Appendix F:a) The Original Store Expansion Strategy:In 1992 and 1993 Starbucks developed a three-year geographic expansion strategy that targeted areas with favourable demographic profiles, that could be serviced and supported by the company's operations infrastructure. A large city was selected to serve as a focal point for each targeted region. Starbucks professional teams were strategically positione...
