Circle the thesis in the following paragraph: Starbucks Coffee Company has gone through drastic changes over the past 37 years. A globally recognized brand, it has stores in 45 markets outside the U.S. with a store count of 16,680 as of September 28, 2008 (CNBC, 2008). The company went through a period of tremendous growth, opening stores at a rate that few companies could match. This rapid growth has now slowed greatly due to a change in the business climate and in company performance. The company has seen the value of its stock reduced by 75% since late 2006 (Barker, 2008), and as a result, has been going through a major transformation since the beginning of this year to try to recover losses and rebuild. The driving cause for Starbucks' recent volatility is its accelerated overgrowth which caused the company to lose much of its identity. This paper will investigate the current state of the company and how it got where it is today, what steps it has taken to recover, how successful those steps have been, and what lessons have been learned from the changes the company has gone through.