Life's Pleasures Quote by Howard Schultz

Schultz’s line lands like a victory lap disguised as a cultural observation: a vast, ancient “tea-drinking country” reduced to a market before-and-after photo. The rhetorical trick is the pronoun. “We” isn’t just Starbucks; it’s Silicon Valley-style confidence, brand evangelism, American consumer capitalism speaking in the first-person plural. Agency belongs to the company, not to Chinese customers who might have chosen coffee for their own reasons. That’s the point. The sentence performs dominance while pretending to be neutral.

The subtext is conversion. “Turned them into” borrows the grammar of religion and assimilation, a soft imperialism where the missionary is a global retailer and the gospel is a latte. It’s also a tidy corporate myth: that culture is malleable if you scale hard enough, design the right “third place,” and price the aspiration just so. Schultz isn’t describing taste; he’s describing leverage.

Context matters because China has long been both symbol and prize for multinational brands: difficult, massive, and politically loaded. Coffee in Chinese cities has been growing for years, fueled by younger consumers, international travel, local chains, and social media status signaling. Schultz collapses that messy, bidirectional story into a single narrative of American authorship.

Why it works, especially in business storytelling, is its simplicity: it frames Starbucks as not merely participating in globalization but directing it. It flatters investors and executives who want to believe culture is a KPI. It also reveals the blind spot: when companies talk this way, they invite backlash, because people don’t like being cast as the “them” in someone else’s conquest tale.