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Starbucks is here, in the heart of Vienna, a city with a 300 year-old coffee tradition dating back to the invasion of the Turks, and then to ban smoking in it.
Many Viennese believe that their culture has been infected, that Viennese use their 1,900 or so coffee shops to linger and meet, smoke and drink, savor the wonders of pastries with cream and marzipan, ponder the world, write books and read free newspapers. They drink from china cups and order from a waiter, usually in a stained black dinner jacket.
In Austria, there is a coffeehouse for every 530 people, and Austrians drink 1,000 cups of coffee a year outside homes and offices. This is, quite simply, the densest coffee market in the world. One of the most competitive, too. Austrians love their coffee, they go three or four times a day to a coffeehouse to meet friends or do business.
Young people in Austria are not much different from other young people elsewhere in the world. Many view Starbucks as an alternative to the smoky cafes of their parents and prefer the self-serve to an unhurried waiter. In Vienna, the crowd is well-to-do, mostly in their 30s, a mixture of tourists and locals.
Howard Schultz is an American businessman and entrepreneur most widely known as cief global strategist and chairman of Starbucks. Schultz was born July 19, 1953 in Brooklyn, N.Y. . He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He is the oldest child of three. He has a sister Ronnie (b. 1956) and a brother Michael (b. 1961) who live in New York. His mother lives in New Jersey and his father, whom he often speaks of in interviews, is deceased. He presently lives in Seattle with his wife and 2 children. |
Schultz co-authored a book called Pour Your Heart into It that expounds on his life journey with Starbucks.