At my local Starbucks this morning, I had to struggle to find a parking place. Inside, people played with their children, lovers flirted in the corners, and bloggers huddled over their laptops. John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins played in the background. I spotted no blood on the floor, nor bodies piled up in the back.

One would never have known that two days ago was the most brutal day in Starbucks' history. The company announced it was closing 500 stores on top of the 100 it was already shutting down.

But the occasion was more significant than that. Tuesday, July 1, 2008, was, for Starbucks, a date which will live in infamy. It was the day that two enduring Starbucks myths passed on.

One was the myth of infinite expansion, the idea that America's appetite for venti no-foam lattes was limitless. If Starbucks had its own Frederick Jackson Turner, the great chronicler of America's movement west, he would say that the Starbucks frontier had finally closed—curbed not by the Pacific Ocean but by a tanking economy, the price of gas, and its own imperialistic chutzpah.

The other myth was of the fundamental benevolence of a company that calls every one of its employees "partners." Suddenly, 12,000 of those partners learned about newfangled partnerships that one side could unilaterally terminate.

The chief propagator of those myths was, of course, the architect of Starbucks itself: Howard Schultz, the visionary who built the chain from a five-store boutique in Seattle into an international colossus.

Before profiling him for Condé Nast Portfolio this month, I'd have thought Schultz, who returned as Starbucks' C.E.O. in January after seven years pulling strings from the shadows, would have borne the bad news himself.

Instead, the word came from one of his subalterns: Reports in both The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal mentioned Schultz only in passing. This made sense, I'd learned. Schultz hates dissonance, and doesn't do gloom.

After my article appeared—in fact, even before, since his minions had somehow obtained a copy early—he called to accuse me of "betrayal." I'd let down both him and Starbucks, he said.

It's a curious thing to tell a reporter, but for all his success and savvy, Schultz is not just incredibly thin-skinned, but almost an innocent. He considers himself a philanthropist who happens to run a coffee company, and who happens to have become a billionaire doing so.

Since he hasn't the slightest doubts about the fundamental goodness of either himself or his mission, he simply can't fathom anyone who might—or is paid at least to ask.

So, as exasperating and infuriating as his call was—no reporter likes to be accused of writing a "hatchet job," as he said I had—it was also strangely endearing, as is Schultz himself:

Here was someone who cared less about whether people thought he was smart and competent than about whether they’d consider him a nice guy. Of how many executives could you say such a thing?.

Now 12,000 partners had suddenly learned what betrayal really was. Surely, I surmised, they'd be venting on starbucksgossip.com, the website largely of, by, and for Starbucks employees. But of the hundreds of agonized posts there since Black Tuesday, only a few targeted Schultz himself.

(Sample: "Do you think he stops and thinks for one second about the 12,000 people he puts out of a job?" went one. "No way! No hesitation—no problem. He has no soul, and no conscience. Classic definition of a narcissistic psychopath.")

But more people seemed upset with Schultz's stewardship of the Seattle SuperSonics, which effectively drove the pro basketball team out of town, than with Starbucks. It's as if, for all the talk of the Kool-Aid they've taken, Starbucks employees had stopped buying his shtick.

But I still do. Schultz's beliefs are no act. Claiming, as he told me, that Starbucks' mass-produced espresso is the best in the world, or that he knows better what's best for his employees than any union, may seem delusional. But a delusion is also a conviction, and Schultz, I think, is full of convictions.

Every Starbucks barista knows the story of Schultz's father, a painter in Brooklyn who, laid up with an injury, could barely support his family. It was this experience, or so sayeth Starbucks scripture, that led Schultz to resolve to do better by his employees, providing health care to them even though they only worked part-time.

Discarding so many of them now is, I bet, more than he can bear, or maybe even, assimilate: Otherwise, his father would now be the one who feels betrayed. Better to look the other way, and fob off the task to someone else.

The Starbucks near me is clearly not on the endangered list. Most of the outlets targeted for the scrap heap are either in places where recession has hit hardest, like Florida and California, or which have been opened in the last few years, or which are hard by existing stores.

My Starbucks—in the beachside Hamptons section of Long Island, a place which Schultz originally declared Starbucks-free so that his summers here wouldn't be spoiled by thoughts of work—has been around a while. It is miles from any other Starbucks (or any other place serving decent coffee) and is in a community that really is, as Schultz once said of Starbucks' entire realm, "recession-proof."

Here, for the foreseeable future, Starbucks remains the "affordable indulgence" Schultz has always described.

And, as my morning at my local reminded me, at its best, Starbucks is far more than that. Outside, it is getting hot, and a line of behemoth S.U.V.'s are rumbling in for the holiday weekend. But inside, things are extremely pleasant.

This Starbucks, unlike many others, is neat and clean and bright, not clutter and noise in sepia. Everyone—employees and customers alike—seems in a good mood. The music—Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls are now singing Bring it On Home to Me—is pleasant. No one has hassled me for an instant. A friend came up to me to say hello, and there are all those other interesting people here I don't yet know.

My cappuccino—I asked for it "semi-dry," to get it the way it should always be made, without lots of preliminary adjectives—was excellent. And after rummaging around for one, then rinsing out the dust, they even served it to me in a genuine ceramic cup.

There are those who never liked Starbucks, who think its beans are too "burned," etc. Others, like me, once patronized it often, but soured on the place as it turned sloppy and mechanized. Whatever business Schultz lost from us he more than made up for as the teeny-boppers arrived.

The real problem comes from Americans suddenly pinching their pennies, and going to McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts or 7-Eleven instead. But this morning reminded me anew of Howard Schultz's great accomplishment: he has created America's civilian USO, a home away from home.

There will now be a few fewer of those homes, spread out more reasonably, but neither Wall Street nor OPEC nor some competitor can diminish what Schultz has achieved.

The only question is, should recession-ridden Americans stay away, how good a business that achievement really is, and whether emotional, sentimental, and suddenly invisible Howard Schultz can fix it.