Starbucks is winning customers back after investing $500 million in workers and stores

Starbucks on Tuesday reported quarterly sales growth in the U.S. that blew past Wall Street’s expectations, and its operations chief credited more staffing in its stores and enhanced employee benefits for the coffee chain’s quickly improving fortunes.

“It really comes from the coffee houses and the partners who empower them, which has been a focal point of this turnaround all along,” Starbucks chief operating officer Mike Grams told Fortune in an exclusive interview after the earnings release. “It’s all led to our coffee houses just simply running more consistently.”

The company said that comparable sales, a metric that strips out the impact of recently opened or closed stores, rose 7.1% in the United States last quarter, the second quarterly increase in a row and well above the 4.5% increase analysts were expecting, according to Consensus Metrix. (Companywide, comparable sales rose 6.1%, while total revenue increased 9% to $9.5 billion.)

Most encouragingly for the company, U.S. store traffic was up again, rising 4.4%, meaning Starbucks continues to win back customers it had lost in recent years because of myriad problems such as long lines for order pickups, inconsistent quality of the items ordered and stores that had eliminated seating or were simply inadequately maintained and........

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