What if you bought Starbucks in 1995?
US Consumer · Food. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play52.9× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Starbucks at the start of 1995 would be worth about $52,941 today — 52.9 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Starbucks turned a commodity into an experience: Howard Schultz bought the Seattle coffee roaster in 1987 and spent the 1990s and 2000s opening stores at a furious pace, selling the idea of a third place between home and work. The split-adjusted price grew from under two dollars in 1995 to around thirty-five by early 2007.
Then expansion turned into overexpansion. Stores cannibalized each other, the experience diluted, and the 2008 recession arrived. Schultz returned as chief executive that year, closed hundreds of underperforming stores and famously shut all US locations for an afternoon to retrain baristas. The stock recovered strongly through the 2010s, helped by mobile ordering, loyalty programs and rapid growth in China. The 2020s were rockier: a unionization drive, intense competition from local chains in China, slower traffic and complex menus clogging operations. In 2024 the company hired Brian Niccol from Chipotle to fix it. By 2026 the stock traded roughly where it had in early 2020.
The lesson: Growth for its own sake can erode the very thing that made a brand special; store count is not the same as value.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $1.70 | $52,941 | $14,783 | 52.9× |
| 2000 | $5.50 | $16,364 | $4,626 | 16.4× |
| 2003 | $5.00 | $18,000 | $7,727 | 18.0× |
| 2005 | $15.00 | $6,000 | $5,763 | 6.0× |
| 2007 | $35.00 | $2,571 | $4,789 | 2.6× |
| 2008 | $20.00 | $4,500 | $4,626 | 4.5× |
| 2010 | $23.00 | $3,913 | $6,071 | 3.9× |
| 2012 | $46.00 | $1,957 | $5,312 | 2.0× |
| 2015 | $41.00 | $2,195 | $3,301 | 2.2× |
| 2018 | $57.00 | $1,579 | $2,519 | 1.6× |
| 2020 | $88.00 | $1,023 | $2,092 | 1.0× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $52,941. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Starbucks is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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