If you don't love what you're doing with unbridled passion and enthusiasm, you're not going to succeed when you hit obstacles.

Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march.

On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.

I do think - as self-serving as it sounds - that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.

The growth of the company and the license that Starbucks has is to participate in other food and beverage opportunities. We have a global business... and in many parts of the world, tea is much, much bigger than coffee, and we're going to bring tea and bring our capability and our understanding of what we've done for coffee to tea.

Starbucks trying to build a different kind of company around the balance of profitably and benevolence. A social conscience. And that isn't a program it has to be a way of life.

I really believe that you cannot use the stock market as a proxy for the economy.