Howard Schultz CEO Starbucks tells the story of his father

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And my dad never made more than $20,000 a year. We were a blue-collar, lower-class family. The rent, when I was a kid, that my parents were paying was $96 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. And it was a tough childhood. When I was seven years old, I came home from school in 1960. And I walked in, and my father was spread on a couch with a cast from his waist to his ankle. He had a terrible, he had a series of really bad jobs. But this one particular job was probably the worst. He was a diaper delivery man before the invention of Pampers, you can imagine. And he fell on a sheet of ice and broke his hip and an ankle. And in 1960, if you were a blue-collar worker and you got hurt on the job, you were basically dismissed. There was no workman's compensation. There was no health insurance. And we were just, I was witnessing at the age of seven literally the fracturing of the American dream. And I witnessed what my parents went through in terms of my father's self-esteem and just what it was like to be left behind. Now, I never imagined my wildest dreams that a kid from Brooklyn on the other side of the tracks would one day be in a position to be part of a great company or certainly be in a position to build a great company. But once I was, I realized that that imprinting moment at the age of seven in 1960 needed to be linked to something for the future of our company. And in a way, I wanted to try and build the kind of company that my father never got a chance to work for. So almost 26 years ago, Starbucks became the first company in America to provide comprehensive health insurance and equity in the form of stock options to every single employee, including part-time workers. That was a huge, huge commitment on our part. And we did that when we were a private company still losing money.