Howard Schultz: President of The Ratio!

Remember Howard Schultz? The burnt coffee billionaire? Thinking about accidentally helping Trump get re-elected? And (arguably) most egregiously, HE WHO HELPED SEND THE SONICS OUT OF SEATTLE?

Although other terrible news has pushed him out of the spotlight for the moment, I wanted to take a brief look at the best thing Schultz has created:

His Twitter account.

We are now 27 days into the glorious life of @HowardSchultz on twitter dot com, and he started with a bang, by discovering the ratio on his “Hello, world!” tweet:

It feels good to be here. My hope is to share my truth, listen to yours, build trust, and focus on things that can make us better.

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) January 27, 2019

I don’t know if we fully appreciate just how powerful this tweet was (although I’m confident some future socialmediaology grad student will write a really B+ paper about this). Schultz got himself ratioed on his very first try! It’s like hitting a home run in your first major league at-bat. And while he’s managed to increase his likes in February, Schultz’s reply-to-retweet ratio streak has continued unbroken.

Over the past month, Schultz has sent twenty-four (honestly, pretty dull) tweets. And yet, all twenty-four times the replies have easily outnumbered the retweets. It’s already a streak that may never be broken, an astonishing accomplishment, even for someone who has managed to get the entire country to see what Seattle already knew.

But every great streak throughout history has needed a little luck to keep going. Joe DiMaggio was almost intentionally walked out of a hit halfway through his 56-game hit streak. Orel Hershiser needed an extra-inning game at the end of the season to reach 59 scoreless innings pitched. And Schultz has come close to not being ratioed a couple of times, hitting his low point with a ratio of *only* 2.18 here:

Does anyone think our government is doing well for the American people?

Not one hand raised. #ReimagineUS pic.twitter.com/j3yCdclbsu

— Howard Schultz (@HowardSchultz) February 13, 2019

Imagine! If he had a few more fans, or knew how to google “buy twitter retweets,” Schultz’s legendary streak would have ended there. But thankfully, our hero managed to just hustle out an infield single of a ratio and kept things going. And to his credit, the very next night Schultz hit a massive no-doubt-about-it home run by posting a picture of himself with Bill Kristol, just to prove to any doubters that he still had it.

Someday (hopefully soon), Howard Schultz will decide he’s sold enough books and end his absurd campaign to prove he’s less likeable than Mark Zuckerberg. At that point, he’ll likely take his twitter account and go home. Already, his tweets have become less frequent, and lean more into video clips of his empty calorie hot takes like “I want us to be proud!” or “Elected officials should work for us!”

But until then, his magical streak continues, and as long as he doesn’t take it as evidence that the people want him to actually run for POTUS, I am more than happy to declare Howard Schultz our one true POTR (President of The Ratio).