Starbucks Just Closed a Bunch of Stores. Here’s What Mattered Most

This is a story about Starbucks, economics, and good things that are hard to put a number on.

This month, Starbucks closed just over 2 percent of its locations across the country as part of CEO Brian Niccol’s turnaround effort — focusing on closing stores “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.”

Starbucks has posted six consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales, and Niccol, who just passed the one-year milestone at the helm of Starbucks, was brought in to make aggressive changes.

At the same time, Niccol has been rolling out the Green Apron Service plan — an initiative built around creating human connection and turning Starbucks back into a “third place” where people gather:

• The company invested over $500 million in additional labor hours.
• They brought back Sharpies so baristas could write names and smiley faces on cups.
• They set a goal to fulfill orders within four minutes while emphasizing personal connection.

“This isn’t just a new way of working,” Niccol said. “It’s a return to what makes Starbucks special: Human connection.”

All of which explains why the story of one Starbucks in particular caught my eye.

Meet Aerin, an 11-year-old girl who lives on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. This is a young girl who loves her Starbucks.

More than that, she loved going to the particular Starbucks across the street from the New York City apartment where she lived with her mother, Alisa.

The location was close and busy enough that Alisa felt comfortable letting Aerin hang out there on weekends. Aerin would come home with stories about a barista named Brittany, according to Adriane Quinlan at Curbed.

When Alisa broke the news, Aerin asked: “Who died?”

“It’s not a person,” Alisa told her. “It’s the Starbucks.”

As Curbed reports, Brittany was the first person Aerin had befriended on her own, outside of camps and schools and family friends.

Aerin wrote a goodbye card, but by the time she tried to deliver it, the store had closed. Now she’s trying to track Brittany down through a friend’s doorman who used to work there.

Seriously, it’s a whole thing.

It looks like the closures hit New York particularly hard — 8.5 percent of the shuttered stores were in the state, with more than half in the five boroughs alone, according to a crowdsourced account.

Stores closed across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens — from the Upper West Side to Greenpoint to Flushing. Some were recently renovated. Some were busy right up until they closed

As Curbed puts it anyway, Starbucks had really overcome something in New York City — transforming from a chain that pummeled mom-and-pop cafés into something like a neighborhood institution.

The Greenpoint closure prompted stories from a pizza shop owner who did all his job interviews at that Starbucks and a former employee who met their wife there.

Look, these are business decisions. Maybe the locations weren’t profitable. Maybe they were redundant — too many Starbucks clustered too close together.

(My favorite Onion story from long ago:  “New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks.”)

Maybe the real estate economics didn’t make sense anymore.

Those are all legitimate reasons for closing stores.

But, isn’t Niccol right when he talks about the importance of creating emotional connections with customers?

That connection is what separates a successful business from a commodity. At the risk of committing modern consumer blasphemy, it’s not like the coffee at Starbucks is so special.

Instead, it’s the connection that builds loyalty that transcends price and convenience.

The challenge is that you can’t always predict where those connections will form — at least when you’re opening and closing hundreds of stores, and managing a workforce of the size of Starbucks.

Those connections often happen organically, in daily interactions between baristas and customers.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but they happen when an 11-year-old feels comfortable enough to befriend a barista named Brittany.

When you close stores where those connections existed — even for good business reasons — you’re betting that customers will follow you to a different location or form new connections elsewhere.

Maybe that’s exactly what will happen. Maybe Aerin will find a new favorite Starbucks and a new favorite barista.

But for now, she’s keeping the last cup Brittany ever prepared for her as a talisman.

You can’t put a number on that.