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
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 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 many downtowns (think Portland which has been up to nearly 40% office vacancy rates), the downtown stores have lost a lot of business and/or have been closed.
Thus, in the midst of retail cafe disarray, the union is striking Starbucks.
This reminds 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 ended up shuttering plants which were sufficiently old they could not compete in the new global markets, and over 4,000 workers lost their jobs with many moving out of the area.
