Howard Schultz: The Star Of Starbucks

Scott Pelley Meets The Man Behind The Coffee Empire

(CBS) 
As a teen, Schultz says his dream was to get out. "It was, I never allowed myself to dream beyond that. I was afraid to dream beyond that."

Dreams, he told us, seemed futile after his father, Fred, was injured on the job.

"This is the hallway I walked down at the age of 7 and opened up that door and saw my father on a couch with a cast," Schultz recalls. "He broke his leg on the job. He was a delivery driver, picking up and delivering cloth diapers. Terrible job.

"When he fell on the job, he basically was turned loose. He was out of work. There was no hospitalization, no health insurance, no workman's compensation and we were done as a family and I saw the hopelessness, I saw the plight of a working class family, I saw the fracturing of the American dream first hand at the age of 7. That memory scarred me."

Schultz has organized his company around that memory. He provides health insurance to employees who work as little as 20 hours a week. He raised prices to do it. And now Starbucks spends more on health care than it does on coffee.

"What I've said to our own people is that we will not — you're never supposed to say never, but I said never — we will never turn our back on this benefit for our people," says Schultz.

When you pay $4 for coffee, you're funding Schultz's social agenda — the health care, stock options for employees and more. He even pays farmers higher than market rate for beans.

Schultz got out of the housing project but something about it never left him.

What was he thinking, visiting his old home?

"Just everything that's happened to me since standing here, how many times I walked through that door," he says. "I think there were many moments when people said, not to me directly, but I remember hearing things that, 'Don't aim too high.' Not my parents, but people. 'You're from Brooklyn, you're from the projects. Don't aim too high.' "

All these years later, Schultz is aiming to at least triple the number of stores to 30,000 worldwide. He thinks that China may be his biggest market and he has nearly 400 stores in the region already, including one in Beijing's Forbidden City.

What was once a coffee bar has become a marketing machine for an expanding entertainment business. It produces its own music and, this week, Starbucks opens its first movie. It's called "Akeelah and the Bee" as in spelling bee, a feel-good film about a poor kid who triumphs.

It's called "Akeelah and the Bee" as in spelling bee, a feel-good film about a poor kid who learns how to spell big words. Words like prestidigitation.

"Prestidigitation" means skill in pulling off illusions, like a magician. Howard Schultz admits there was more than a little sleight of hand in conjuring up Starbucks and turning the dullest, most common drink in America, into something mysterious.