“We’re not this young, beloved, entrepreneurial enterprise anymore,” he concedes. “We have to do business in a different way. And now we’re being tested, for the first time.” That goes not just for Starbucks but for Schultz himself. He too has had an incredible run, which has taken him from making cold calls for Xerox to having Mick Jagger over to his house for dinner. (“Very nice guy, and ­really interested in business.”) These days, lots of people are waiting for Schultz to fall, or at least be unmasked. These days, he’s taking his coffee not mit schlag but mit schadenfreude. Online and in the press, as well as among coffee mavens, Seattle sports fans, environmentalists, nutritionists, fair-trade advocates, and even some of his own baristas, he is under attack.

Or maybe he is simply being held to his own lofty rhetoric. The question now is whether Schultz can be loved on Wall Street and everywhere else at once, whether he can remain what he has always aspired, and thinks himself, to be: a mogul, sure, but also a mensch.

Only last year, Schultz told talk-show host Charlie Rose that Starbucks was “fairly recession-proof.” The economy had dipped before, but Starbucks had always managed to be what Schultz likes to call an affordable luxury. But this time the economy is in a tailspin; the housing market has collapsed; the price of the two fluids most vital to Starbucks’ health—petroleum and milk—has skyrocketed. Fewer people are walking into the same Starbucks stores than last year. Never before had that happened, even when Starbucks was opening new stores virtually on top of old ones.

In January, Schultz, who’d ostensibly handed off day-to-day control of the company in 2000 to go off and think grand thoughts, had resumed the reins, replacing Jim Donald, who had been C.E.O. since 2005. The day after he returned, the stock shot up more than 8 percent. But it was a short-lived jolt, a corporate doppio espresso. In late May, the price hovered at about $18 a share; 20 months before, it had been nearly $40. A flurry of initiatives—what Schultz has dubbed, with characteristic grandiosity, his “transformational agenda”—hasn’t yet helped.

Starbucks is closing 100 underperforming stores and cutting way back—at least by its own exponential standards—on expansion in the U.S.  There’s a super-duper new Swiss-made espresso machine, one promising mass-produced perfection. (It is also lower-slung, allowing baristas to make all-important eye contact with customers.) There’s the Clover, an ingenious and expensive—$11,000 a pop—machine for French-pressing coffee by the cup. (So dazzled was Schultz by it that he bought the company.) And there’s Pike Place Roast, a new blend designed to strengthen Starbucks in the world of drip coffee, where McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts are nipping at its heels. The blend’s name—honoring the location of what has come to be known as Starbucks’ flagship store—is a nod to the company’s roots, and so is the packaging; it features Starbucks’ originally zaftig, busty mermaid, which had been bowdlerized many years ago to placate American bluenoses.

This February, in a great theatrical stroke, Schultz closed more than 7,000 stores for three hours to allow 135,000 baristas to relearn—or learn—how to make decent espresso. (Three hours apparently sufficed; much of the process at Starbucks is automated anyway.) Schultz insists, though, that the gesture, which cost the company an estimated $10 million in labor costs and lost revenue, was no gimmick. It did seem to confirm what aficionados have long known: Starbucks’ espresso often isn’t very good, and it has gotten worse. But the stunt garnered priceless publicity, including a Stephen Colbert depiction of Starbucks withdrawal that outdid anything Ray Milland endured in The Lost Weekend. When the clip was shown at the company’s annual meeting in March, it brought down the house. “People want to know why we don’t advertise,” Schultz joked afterward.

Starbucks, Schultz says, will look forward “with laser, laser intensity” by looking back to where it all began: the coffee. The company’s Great Satan is the poor breakfast sandwich, which, while it earns handsome profits, embodies Starbucks’ deviation from its core business, besides stinking up the joint and obliterating the heavenly aroma of freshly ground beans. Schultz has ordered it banished.