By early 2008, Starbucks was in trouble. After years of rapid growth, its stock had fallen more than 40 percent in a year, fewer customers were coming through the doors, and cheaper competitors were selling espresso drinks of their own. Founder Howard Schultz, who had stepped back from running the company years earlier, returned as CEO in January 2008.

Schultz believed the problem wasn’t only the economy. In the rush to open stores, Starbucks had let the basics slip. Drinks were being made in a hurry. Milk was steamed in big batches ahead of time and reheated. Shots of espresso sat too long before being poured. The coffee, the thing the whole company was built on, had become ordinary.

So on a Tuesday afternoon in February 2008, Starbucks did something almost unheard of for a big retailer. It closed all 7,100 of its U.S. stores at 5:30 p.m. A sign on the doors said the company was taking time to perfect its espresso. For about three and a half hours, roughly 135,000 baristas went back to basics: how to pull a good shot, how to steam milk properly, and how to recognize a drink that wasn’t good enough. They were told that if a shot wasn’t right, they should pour it out and start again.

The afternoon cost the company an estimated $6 million in lost sales and labor, and a rival used the moment to advertise cheap espresso. But Starbucks said its coffee quality scores rose in the weeks that followed. The training was the first step in a longer turnaround that also included closing about 600 underperforming U.S. stores later that year. Within a couple of years, the company was growing again.