Starbucks closing 600 stores in the US

by nukemdomis | July 1, 2008 at 09:32 pm | 451 views | 7 comments

This means some bad news for the employees of these stores. So many companies are reducing work force numbers due to this slumping economy.

Most of us here in the states know of at least one person that has been affected by these coporate changes.

SEATTLE - Starbucks Corp. has announced it's closing 600 underperforming stores in the United States.

The Seattle-based premium coffee company also announced Tuesday it expects to open fewer than 200 new company-operated stores in the United States in fiscal 2009.
The company says it will try to place workers from closed stores in remaining Starbucks.

The old joke that there’s a Starbucks on every corner may soon not ring quite as true.

Starbucks Corp. said Tuesday that it has drastically increased the number of stores it plans to close and could eliminate as many as 12,000 full- and part-time positions as a result.

The company said it now plans to close 600 company-operated stores in the United States, up from its previous plans to close 100 stores.

Starbucks also said it will open fewer than 200 stores in its coming fiscal year, which begins Sept. 29. That’s down from a previous target of opening 250 stores during that period.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the job cuts represent about 7 percent of Starbucks' global workforce. Still, Starbucks said it expects many workers to find jobs in nearby stores.

SEATTLE -- For a decade it appeared there was no such thing as too many Starbucks for U.S. coffee drinkers, whose willingness to buy its $4 lattes and dark drip brews rationalized a second green-and-white mermaid awning just down the street - and sometimes even a third.

But in a sign that those days are over, Starbucks Corp. announced Tuesday it will close 600 company-operated stores in the next year, as the faltering U.S. economy hastened the pain caused by the company's own rapid expansion.

Starbucks did not say which stores will be closed, only that they are spread throughout the country. But it did say 70 percent of those slated for closure had opened after the start of 2006.

To put it another way, Starbucks is closing 19 percent of all U.S. company-operated stores that opened in the last two years, Chief Financial Officer Pete Bocian said during a conference call.