Starbucks closes 600 stores

[Robroy]

[TJ_98370]

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Many Starbucks customers figured out long ago what the Seattle coffee giant seems to have just realized: Opening shops too close to each other isn't good for business.

"Starbucks was stupid," Leslie Miller said yesterday between sips of a decaf outside the chain's shop at the Massachusetts State Transportation Building in downtown Boston. "They put them right next to one another.".....
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[Robroy]

[Robroy]

[TJ_98370]

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Starbucks wants to get back to its roots to help turn around its ailing fortunes. It brought back the pioneering chief executive Howard Schultz to run the coffee chain day to day, and it has introduced a new blend, Pike Place Roast, that harks back to the location of its first Seattle store.

Yet for all the new marketing efforts, Starbucks's biggest mistakes and greatest challenges boil down to three words: location, location and location......

........The bitter economy is hurting countless retailers and restaurant chains. But the prospect of Starbucks closing stores, rather than opening them, is different. The company has long been known in the world of commercial real estate for its expertise at selecting prime locations and its fearlessness in establishing almost comic ubiquity in some neighborhoods.

Starbucks would not comment for this article. But it appears that the company strayed from the exacting real estate science that it had perfected and guided it through its first expansion wave.

Though the flagging economy and soaring gas prices are responsible for at least some of Starbucks's woes, interviews with commercial real estate brokers nationwide who work with the chain suggest another aspect of the story. These people say that the company was so determined to meet its growth promises to Wall Street that it relaxed its standards for selecting new store locations.

In some cases, brokers say, Starbucks misjudged the risks of putting stores close to each other, leading to the decline in same-store sales that the company started reporting for the first time in its history this year.

It also overextended itself in certain regions, like in the South and in Southern California, which are among the hardest hit by the housing crisis, and whose older demographics and hot weather are not generally conducive to creating long lines of customers eager to pay $4 for foam-top lattes.

"The economy exposed all the flaws in their thinking," said one commercial real estate broker, .......
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[SeattleMoose]

"Once you get a large and/or sharp TV and sound system, the movie experience can actually be BETTER at home."

What? You don't like $6 popcorn, $4 drinks, crying babies, people talking loudly on cell phones, and seats that smell funny and have crawly things on them?

You...you..you....are not a PATRIOT!!!

[Robroy]

[deejayoh]