Starbucks is shutting around 1% of its stores in North America
The chain is also axing 900 non-retail jobs.
In a message posted on the company’s website toward the end of last week, Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, announced that the chain would be shutting hundreds of stores that don’t fit with the “Back to Starbucks” vision he’s been implementing since taking the role just over a year ago. The closures will translate to a 1% drop in Starbucks’ North American store count, taking its total locations across the US and Canada to fewer than 18,300 by the end of the fiscal year.
Alongside the coffeehouse closures, Niccol also confirmed that the company would be eliminating about 900 non-retail positions in the region, instead investing in its “green apron partners” (baristas) and “elevated coffeehouse designs.”
For anyone worried about whether their local branch to pick up a pumpkin spice latte from has been chopped, Business Insider has started compiling a list of closing locations; as fans of the chain will know, Starbucks shutting stores rather than more cropping up is a pretty rare occurrence.
With a hybrid business model — in which roughly half of the company’s 40,000-plus stores are run by Starbucks itself — the closures suggest we might have hit “peak Starbucks” in North America.
Though much has been written (and charted) about the coffee giant’s struggles internationally — not least in China, where it’s lost market share to local behemoth Luckin — the company’s issues on home soil are a little more surprising. Consumers moving away from heavily Starbucked urban areas during the pandemic, perturbing high prices, and the rise of independent or smaller chains like Dutch Bros, where sales grew faster than any other public fast-food chain in Q2, have all hurt America’s largest coffee company. At branches that have been open for more than a year, sales have dropped for the last six quarters in a row.
