Social and digital media is a bullet train, and that bullet train is not coming home.

If Vancouver did not succeed as Starbucks from '87 on, our entire international business, which is now thousands of stores and a significant amount of growth and profit, may not have existed.

My biggest concern is that America is drifting towards mediocrity and that people don't recognize - and by people I'm meaning Washington - don't recognize the sense of urgency and the fact that I don't think this is a crisis anymore. I think it's an emergency.

Americans reading the paper, listening to the news every single day, and all you hear is things are getting worse and worse. And that has a psychological effect on consumer confidence. That's what consumer confidence is.

I think that sometimes the difference between winning and losing, success and failure, is this gray line between will, passion and self-belief that says, 'I'm going to do this'.

The premium single-cup segment is the fastest-growing business within the global coffee industry.

When I returned as CEO in 2008, Starbucks had forgotten that meaningful innovations balance an organization's heritage with modern-day relevance and market differentiation, so we had to reorient. In one brainstorming session, we visited and observed great retailers, then asked ourselves, 'If Starbucks did not exist, what type of coffee experience would we create?