SEATTLE — Starbucks has lost its soul and does not know where to find it.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said as much in a recent internal memo to his executives. He wrote that as the world's largest specialty coffee company has expanded from fewer than 1,000 locations to about 13,000, its stores no longer even smell like coffee because of "flavor locked packaging."

His memo grieved, too, over the loss of "the romance and theatre" of traditional Italian espresso makers, which have been replaced by automatic machines. Schultz wrote that the new machines, while more efficient, block customers from watching as coffee drinks are made and sharing what he called an "intimate experience with the barista."

"One of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past," he wrote. "Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee."

The leak of Schultz's lost-our-soul memo has generated buzz on business pages. But it has occasioned only a shrug from the caffeine cognoscenti in Seattle.

For most Seattleites, what Schultz called "the watering down of the Starbucks experience" is stale news — akin to reports that the Seattle SuperSonics (which Schultz sold last year) are a losing National Basketball Association team or that Seattle winters are wet.

"We achieved fresh roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost?" Schultz wrote. "The loss of aroma — perhaps the most powerful non-verbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer, and once again stripping the store of tradition and our heritage."