Starbucks, Back to the Future

Note: The original logo shown above is the original. The new one has been tweaked a little, but I don’t have a clear image of it to show. The big news of the day has, undeniably, been Starbucks. The free coffee for 30 minutes sure helped. But also, it’s been a news item in the making since the 1990s when Starbucks started its insurmountable growth that would eventually come to compromise and cripple its original modus operandi of small, personable and unique. Or, less ominously, the news has been brewing (sorry!) since January of this year, when Howard Schultz took the reigns back as CEO — after an eight year respite from running the coffee empire he set ablaze in 1987 when he bought Starbucks — in order to resuscitate the unimaginably flailing brand. And, today, su