Brian Niccol’s nascent Starbucks turnaround starts with treating workers better

In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune‘s Phil Wahba reports on the factors behind Starbucks’ budding revival.

The big leadership story: Mohamed El-Erian raises recession worries.

The markets: U.S. future are up after the S&P 500 hit another record high.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. This week brought convincing proof that Starbucks’ comeback under CEO Brian Niccol is for real. The coffee chain on Wednesday reported that quarterly U.S. comparable sales rose 7.1%, their second straight gain. What’s more, for the first time in two years, profit and sales both rose, and customer visits increased, showing the investments Niccol has made in more staffing, higher wages, and store glow-ups are starting to pay for themselves.

The CEO’s overarching strategy has been to bring the human touch and pleasure of ordering back to Starbucks. Those experiences were damaged by the company’s efforts to contain costs, which led to understaffed and often chaotic cafés and bad decisions like removing seating at many stores. 

“Customers now believe their Starbucks purchase is worth it compared to a year ago,” Niccol told Wall Street analysts earlier this week. Of course, no CEO can fix a company on his own, and he wouldn’t have gotten Starbucks back into shape without employee buy-in, from his C-suite all the way to his front-line workers. One of Niccol’s key hires was his........

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