“After careful consideration, we are closing some stores in locations that have experienced a high volume of challenging incidents that make it unsafe to continue to operate,” a spokesperson told CNN Business in an email.
The stores are in Seattle; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon. They will be closed by the end of July.
Employees are “seeing firsthand the challenges facing our communities — personal safety, racism, lack of access to healthcare, a growing mental health crisis, rising drug use, and more,” they wrote, adding that “with stores in thousands of communities across the country, we know these challenges can, at times, play out within our stores too.”
Stroud and Nelson said they “read every incident report you file,” adding, “it’s a lot.”
To make workers feel safer in stores, the company is offering active shooter training and other types of trainings, they wrote.
In cases where it isn’t able to create a safe environment in a store, Starbucks will close it permanently, the letter said. In those instances, the company will move employees to neighboring stores.
A new era for Starbucks
“We need to reinvent Starbucks for the future,” he wrote, noting that the company must “radically” improve employee experiences. He added that based on feedback from employees, the company will strive to create “safety, welcoming and kindness for our stores.”
But the unionization drive has only been growing.
As of June 24, the NLRB has certified unions at 133 Starbucks stores with more than 3,400 hourly employees among them, and certified decisions against unionization at 15 locations. Elections are underway at dozens of additional stores.
Regarding that store closure, a company spokesperson said at the time that Starbucks opens and closes stores as part of its regular operations, without offering specific reasons.
“Our local, regional and national leaders have been working with humility, deep care and urgency to create the kind of store environment that partners and customers expect of Starbucks,” the Starbucks spokesperson said in June. “Our goal is to ensure that every partner is supported in their individual situation and we have immediate opportunities available in the market.”
During its most recent fiscal year, Starbucks closed 424 US company-operated stores, or about 5% of its total, while opening 449 new locations.
— CNN Business’s Chris Isidore and Ramishah Maruf contributed to this report.
