Starbucks: The new face of "conscious capitalism"?

But it was not until he returned to Starbucks in 2008, after an eight-year hiatus, that his engagement with political causes became more explicit.

That engagement has led him to campaign on a range of issues. He pledged to hire 10,000 Iraq war veterans and military spouses over five years, and committed $30m to research on post-traumatic stress in veterans. In 2013, he led a petition urging Congress to end the government shutdown and wrote an open letter asking gun owners to refrain from bringing weapons into Starbucks – even if they were allowed to do so shops. When, at the firm’s annual meeting two years ago, an investor complained that Starbucks’s support for gay marriage in Washington state had harmed sales, Schultz invited him to divest his shares.

“The divide between profitability and doing the right thing is collapsing,” Schultz recently told the Seattle Times. He has said he is leading Starbucks “to try to redefine the role and responsibility of a public company”.

But Starbucks stands out because many of the causes it addresses have little to do with its business. “I don’t know where this will go,” Schultz told an employee forum on race relations in Seattle. “But I don’t feel, candidly, that just staying quiet as a company and staying quiet in this building is who we are and who I want us to be.”