Remarkably enough, Starbucks has published a full list of the 600-odd company-operated stores they are closing in the US, a contraction from a building spree that has impacted the company’s future.
There are 9 in Colorado, and only two I’m familiar with — 16th & Wynkoop (the one catty-corner from the Rock Bottom on the 16th Street Mall, I believe), and the Denver Newspaper Agency building (on Colfax right north of the downtown plaza). That leaves only approximately eleventy-zillion in the downtown Denver area (Katherine counted five on our walk over to the Rock Bottom for dinner on Wednesday, and I can think of three within a couple of blocks of the DNA building), plus various Peets, Peaberry’s, and Daz Bog’s.
I’m not sure, to be sure, how many of those plethora of Starbucks remaining are “company operated” stores. The ones you see in Barnes & Noble stores, for example, are not.
Interestingly, in Chicago, at least, the closures are meeting with some controversy, the ironic opposite of the “Oh my God, another Starbucks?” reaction that so many people seem to have. Many of the stores closing are in “largely minority areas in the south suburbs as well as neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides.”
The closings include stores in largely minority areas in the south suburbs as well as neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides. “Starbucks became symbolic of a community that was changing and in transition,” said Earnest Gates, executive director of the Near West Side Community Development Corp. “To take that away, it’s a blow to a community.”
[…] “It’s horrible it’s closing down,” Phil Jackson, associate pastor at Lawndale Community Church, said of the location in his neighborhood. “We can’t stand for that place to be closing down. It’s jobs. We’ve got college students working there, adults that have management skills that can be seen and observed by Starbucks. They could run their own store one day.”
[…] “The people in the community have to make it family, make it a part of their own, and sometimes that takes longer than a year and a half,” he said. “For Starbucks to look at all the communities that are already suffering, and then to close the stores that they are closing is really kind of hypocritical. [They] started the store knowing what the community was all about. You come here so you can uplift the community.”
Well, no, Starbucks came there to “do well by doing good” — not as a charity, but as a chance to make money while (we’ll be generous) doing something good for a community. But the bottom line remains the bottom line, unfortunately (for all concerned). And, for that matter, if it takes “longer than a year and a half” for a store to become enough of a part of the community to become “part of their own” and start turning a profit … I’m not sure that’s actually Starbucks’ fault, is it?
(via Ginny)
Judging by the ID numbers of stores they’re closing there are 14,000-odd Starbucks so 600 would be a little under 5%. Maybe this will take out most of the stores that compete with sister stores a block away.
That’s one of the goals. MOst of the stores (from earlier stories) were opened in the last couple of years, and have been marginal performers (thus both impacting Starbuck’s balance sheet and being obvious candidates for closure).
There are new SBs that aren’t cannibalizing other store sales. but too many of them, I think, have been.
I think if you could look into the offices of Starbucks that you’d find a spreadsheet with lease end dates. The vast majority of these closures are probably lease-term related.
While I’m sure they used store saturation to inform the closings I’d imagine that they set a target number and then looked for the easiest way to meet that number.
I’m not sure I agree. I would suspect that retail lease rates right now are probably pretty soft, which would make renewing easy. Plus given the investment in each store, closing it still represents both a cost (of doing so) and a write-off of that investment (probably depreciated more than 2 years), so the decision’s got to be driven by some other more significant criteria.