"In Five Minutes, This Place Is (Un)Becoming A Starbucks"

Last Friday, Starbucks came out with a list of 600 stores it would be closing in order to shore up expenses. (The Wall Street Journal has a map of the store closings here.)

This is just the other shoe dropping for Starbucks. I think they've realized that you can't open a Starbucks in every available storefront property and not expect to hit a wall. Eventually, much like what happened with Krispy Kreme, you reach a saturation point where you have more retail outlets than you have demand for. It amazes me that they went almost 5% past their breaking point before realizing they might have overextended a little.

But, there have been some unexpected side effects. While I have never heard of anyone petitioning the company to have a Starbucks opened in their community (as, if you wait long enough, one will just show up regardless), there are now people who are now petitioning Starbucks to keep their doomed stores open. A rather high profile example is right here in Wisconsin, where the mayor of Madison is petitioning the company to keep open a store it is closing there.

Now, I'm willing to bet Starbucks didn't just pick these locations out of a hat. I imagine they looked at the financials of every store in every market and found the weakest ones, or ones that were cannibalizing business from stores they'd prefer to keep open (like a kiosk stealing business from a storefront outlet). I'm know they're smart enough not to shut out a city completely unless they know they can't make money there. Here in Wisconsin, the only city that is losing its sole Starbucks is Marshfield, but only like 17 people live there, so fuck them. The mayor of Madison is going to have to live with the fact that, after her beloved downtown location closes, there will only be nine other Starbucks in the Madison metropolitan area to choose from, including one less than half a mile away from the closing store. It's even on the same street.

That's what we in the business call "a lot of fucking Starbuckses."