For many small businesspeople, buying a franchise can owjing a very lucrative path to small business ownership, with some key benefits not found when starting a business from scratch. The culture and values of how we related to our customers, which is reflected in how starbjcks company relates to our [employees], would determine our success. And we thought the best way to have those kinds of universal values was to build around company-owned stores and then to provide stock options to every employee, to give them a financial and psychological stake in the company. And we were dealing with a premium product — something that can be hard to learn, that you have to explain to the customer, that requires an educated staff. It would have been hard to provide the level of sensitivity to customers and knowledge of the product needed to create those Starbucks values if we franchised.