On September 25, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol informed his employees in a public memo that the company would be cutting 900 corporate roles and closing down stores.
However, the memo didn’t share exactly how many stores would close and where they’re located—leaving employees scrambling to compile that information on their own.
Starbucks is framing the restructuring as a part of Niccol’s broader “Back to Starbucks” plan, a sweeping initiative designed to return Starbucks to its heyday in the mid-2010s. That includes redesigning store interiors, rethinking menus, and making the ordering experience feel less “transactional.”
As of right now, Starbucks is still on shaky financial ground, facing a six-quarter streak of same-store sales declines. It appears that the new job and store cuts are intended to set Starbucks up for the next phase of Niccol’s turnaround plan.
“During the review, we identified coffeehouses where we’re unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance, and these locations will be closed,” Niccol wrote in his recent memo.
While Niccol’s letter shared a broad sense of the reasoning behind the move, it skirted around giving exact figures on store closures, only noting that employees would be informed within the week if their location is shutting down.
For employees, that’s meant gathering on Reddit forums, shared spreadsheets, and Google Maps to figure out just how many coffeehouses are closing down.
How many Starbucks locations are closing?
In his note, Niccol wrote that, “our overall company-operated count in North America will decline by about 1% in fiscal year 2025 after accounting for both openings and closures,” adding that the company will end the fiscal year with nearly 18,300 locations in the U.S. and Canada.
However, given that the 1% number accounts for both openings and closures, it’s unclear exactly how many stores are actually closing.
Reached for comment by Fast Company, Starbucks declined to share details about the fate of specific locations. It said customers were informed via emails and signage and that the Starbucks app has already been updated to reflect the closures.
Given this uncertainty, employees are taking the tabulation into their own hands. In the subreddit r/Starbucks, several threads discussing the closures have amassed hundreds of comments from employees and customers.
Moderators of the subreddit have begun directing users to update a shared Google Sheet with confirmed closures.
As of this writing, the document contains over 520 locations across the U.S. Redditors are also actively compiling the spreadsheet’s results into a map format that designates each store by its status in Starbucks’ union.
Starbucks did not provide a comment on the accuracy of the list, and it’s important to note that this is an active, crowdsourced document.
However, many of the stores indicated on the spreadsheet have disappeared from Starbucks’ store locator tool or are marked “permanently closed” on Google.
Starbucks Workers United, a union that represents baristas at some locations, referred Fast Company to a statement it released last week in the wake of Niccol’s announcement. The statement opens by claiming that things are only going “Backwards at Starbucks” under Niccol’s leadership.
“Yet again, we’re experiencing new policies and major decisions being made with zero barista input,” the union wrote. “Workers United is sending a formal request for information to Starbucks about the planned closures. We expect to engage in effects bargaining for every impacted union store, as we have done elsewhere, so workers can be placed in another Starbucks store according to their preferences.”
