future deficit hawk<\/a>\u00a0Howard acidly describes Dad as a dead-ender who had a \u201clack of a work ethic\u201d and spent beyond his means \u2014 he\u2019d \u201cbuy used tires\u2026 then treat himself to a manicure and a pricey haircut.\u201d<\/p>\nDad worked jobs that were humiliating to young Howard, including driving a diaper delivery truck. He would come home complaining of the odor, and Schultz \u201cwould get a whiff of what he was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n
To get away from \u201cthe smell of his malaise,\u201d young Schultz would sneak to the top of the building stairwell and imagine a less loser-y future. This becomes the operating metaphor of the book, about what \u201cinformed the life I led once I got out of the stairwell.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point, teen Howard curses his mother out (hurling \u201ca certain four-letter curse word followed by \u2018off\u2019\u201d). Then just before dinner, he blithely goes to take a shower, not hearing his father come home. Dad bursts into the shower and punches Howard.<\/p>\n
Howard leaves Canarsie, meets a girl in the Hamptons, gets married, then moves to Seattle to work for a coffee company called Starbucks. He goes on a trip to Italy, visits a caf\u00e9 in Milan, and has the Eureka moment about opening espresso bars in America.<\/p>\n
He leaves Starbucks to branch out on his own, and his first espresso bar, called \u201cIl Giornale,\u201d goes under construction in 1986. He flies his father Fred out to take a look.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took him to see the original Il Giornale store that was under construction,\u201d he writes. \u201cI proudly described my plans to create hundreds of places where people could come sit, visit, and be served Italian-style beverages.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reader guesses well in advance that this vision might not excite his cash-strapped Jewish laborer father from Canarsie. But to Schultz, his father\u2019s puzzlement over the little Italian coffees is a bitter insult.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think my Dad got it,\u201d he said. \u201cAll he saw was a store. And for him, coffee came in a can and should be brewed in a tin percolator. Why all the fuss with the fancy Italian names?\u201d<\/p>\n
Howard\u2019s father dies shortly after, and \u201cany chance of mending our relationship died as well.\u201d This seems to have been a defining moment for Schultz. With this campaign for president, too, he seems determined to make us all admit how grateful we are to have so many places in which to consume pretentiously-named beverages.<\/p>\n
After his father passes, Schultz ends up buying out his old firm, Starbucks, with the aid of some felicitous connections like Bill Gates, Sr. Under that brand name, his vision of ubiquitous espresso bars becomes reality.<\/p>\n
Coffee from there took on a mystical importance. Starbucks, he realized, was \u201cnot just something that exists between four walls,\u201d but a \u201cmindset.\u201d It was \u201cnot home, not work,\u201d but a \u201cthird place\u201d that is \u201ca way to exist in the world.\u201d He went on to banish\u00a0small, medium\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0large\u00a0<\/em>from America\u2019s coffee vocabulary, replacing them with\u00a0tall, short,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0grande.<\/em><\/p>\nSchultz at one point becomes the last principal owner of the Seattle Supersonics, and when taxpayers won\u2019t help him finance an arena, he sells out to an investment group from Oklahoma. His thinking:<\/p>\n
Someone from outside Seattle, I thought, might have a better chance of negotiating a new arena deal because the threat of losing the team could push city officials to come to the table with more favorable terms.<\/em><\/p>\nSchultz claims he only sold the team on a promise that the new group would \u201cspend a year working in good faith with the city\u201d (read: attempt to emotionally blackmail taxpayers) to get a new arena deal.<\/p>\n
To believe this, you\u2019d have to believe sports-crazed Oklahoma City investors would buy an NBA team with no lease obligations in order to\u00a0keep it in Seattle<\/em>.<\/p>\nOf course the Sonics left town, and instead of getting to watch a generation of players like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden dominating basketball from the Pacific Northwest, Seattle fans \u2014 whom the ever-cloying Schultz calls his \u201cmost precious\u201d stakeholders \u2014 got to suck eggs every winter.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Schultz became a mega-billionaire on his way to offering \u201cmore than 170,000 variations of Starbucks beverages.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once you get past the somewhat interesting \u201cavenging my loser Dad\u201d portions, the rest of the book is just collections of clich\u00e9s lifted variously from the campaign-lit and CEO-bio genres. Schultz\u2019s mind is a giant T-shirt.<\/p>\n
He goes to Gettysburg and learns \u201cExperience\u2026 is the clay of wisdom.\u201d Entrepreneurship is like \u201craising a child.\u201d(Forbes alone has done that headline at least twice.)<\/p>\n
\u201cMagic,\u201d he writes, \u201cis not reserved for selling pie and coffee. It can extend to any endeavor \u2014 like trying to create jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
368 pages of this!<\/p>\n
Politically, Schultz belongs to the \u201cOpportunity Democrat\u201d species that began popping up in the mid-Eighties. That was when Third Way\/New Democrat types replaced lunch pail labor slogans with the tall, grande and venti of political themes: \u201cAccountability, responsibility, opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s his obligatory paean to \u201copportunity\u201d:<\/p>\n
One way to describe the American Dream is as a promise\u2014a promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Inherent to that pursuit, I believe, is having access to opportunities like education and good jobs\u2026 Opportunity shows up as luck, but is also embedded into our social, governmental, and corporate constructs\u2026<\/p>\n
What else? Schultz has \u201cdisdain\u201d for the political class, but he \u201cviewed Senator McCain as an exception.\u201d He was sort of against the Vietnam War as a youth, but didn\u2019t protest because he was \u201cmore focused on trying to get out of Canarsie than trying to get the country out of a conflict half a world away.\u201d<\/p>\n
He spends a lot of time talking about the various social campaigns started by Starbucks, including plans to offer jobs to immigrants or to raise capital for small entrepreneurs by selling $5 bracelets that read INDIVISIBLE.<\/p>\n
Which is fine, and frankly, unless you\u2019re the kind of person for whom triteness is a felony, Schultz is more of a bore than a monster. On that last point, though, From the Ground Up is exceptionally dull, so completely devoid of ideas that it\u2019s almost interesting. Schultz makes the Romney family cookbook read like Dante\u2019s Inferno.<\/p>\n
Which wouldn\u2019t be a problem \u2014 America is used to douchey CEOs \u2014 except Schultz just injected himself into the 2020 election season in the most negative conceivable way, virtually guaranteeing four more Trump years if he spends enough money tilting at the national popularity windmill.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s running for the same dumb reason that\u2019s inspired various Wall Street leaders to whisper concerns about 2020 to reporters of late: they fear and despise wealth-tax-proposing liberals like Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren more than they disapprove of the Trump presidency, and are too stupid to keep that evil thought to themselves.<\/p>\n
If Schultz runs and Trump wins, people around the globe will pelt him with batteries and cat turds for all eternity. He\u2019ll wish he long ago died and went to share a hell-cauldron full of Sonics fans. Is anything in the world more dangerous than a bored billionaire?<\/p>\n
Magic at its best.<\/strong><\/span> Show this video to your kids.<\/p>\n
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