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.