Starbucks, which has seen weakening business for some time, will see 650 stores hit by worker strikes: Starbucks union authorizes open-ended strike as holiday season begins
650 stores are about 4% of their footprint so the strike will not likely have a huge impact – for now – on Starbucks.
Starbucks has been closing stores, in part, due to changes in the market for coffee drinks. Since the Covid nonsense, customers stopped going into stores – turning stores into pick up/take out locations. And since then, younger customers have switched from custom-made to order drinks to buying pre-packaged coffee drinks available at grocery stores.
Similarly, many Starbucks stores were in downtown locations – but a combination of “work from home”, “remote work”, and the decay of downtowns (think Portland which has been up to nearly 40% office vacancy rates), the downtown stores have lost business and/or have been closed.
Simultaneously, global coffee prices have hit an all time high – and Trump imposed high tariffs on countries that produce coffee beans. Except for Hawaii, the US cannot grow coffee beans – so the tariffs serve no purpose to protect US coffee growers nor to encourage new coffee farms in the U.S. (Coffee cannot grow in most of the U.S.)
Thus, in the midst of retail cafe disarray, the union is striking Starbucks.
This is reminiscent of when the steel workers union shut down Kaiser aluminum plants, just as global aluminum prices were collapsing. The strike lasted almost two years. Where I lived, Kaiser closed old plants which could not compete in the new global markets, and over 4,000 workers lost their jobs with many moving out of the area. The strike was a fiasco that led to the loss of thousands of jobs.
