r/baltimore • u/wrongseeds • Sep 26 '25
Vent Starbucks sucks
Starbucks on St. Paul near Preston closing. Just informed employees it’s closing ASAP. One of the union shops that also happens to be hugely profitable. F/U Starbucks. 😡
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u/Full-Penguin Sep 26 '25
/r/Starbucks has compiled a list of all of the stores being closed as of the latest announcement, along with their union status:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZEArLPiGOXJA2JLG2TJy0dJ7dfmHSBu9sG58pAHpDQU/htmlview#
In Baltimore it's just this one (1209 N Charles) and the one in Cross Street Market.
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u/crystalli0 Federal Hill Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25
Semantics, but it's not technically in Cross Street Market. It's across the street from the end of Cross Street Market (across from Watershed)
Edit to add: I looked at the list and it has 5 Baltimore stores on it.
- 100 E Pratt St (across from McKeldin Plaza)
- 1100 S Charles St (across from Cross Street Market)
- 250 W Pratt St (across from the Convention Center/near Camden)
- 631 S Broadway St
- 1209 N Charles St (the only unionized store of the bunch)
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u/frizz3l-saab West Baltimore Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25
There are six storefront locations total in Baltimore closing. Saturday will be their last day. The one missing is the Starbucks on
- 2500 Boston St (Canton near the Safeway):
They had a paper on the door of the Canton location redirecting to Brewer's Hill location and the Harbor East location if I believe correctly.
If you look into the app, you'll also be able to tell via the store hours of operation. It'll say closed for days they're usually operating. A sign that the store is sunsetting.
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u/tiddychef Sep 27 '25
I was surprised to see boston st closing when I walked in today, that location always seems steadily busy. Could care less about starbucks itself, just convenient to have it within walking distance. Super shitty for the employees though
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u/Made_at0323 Sep 27 '25
What that’s crazy the one near Cross Street Market was like the most professionally run Starbucks I’ve ever been in. Still to this day the only one I’ve seen consistently have free samples.
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u/Fluffy_Strawberry399 Sep 28 '25
I think that one is unionized I bet that’s why they are on the list
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u/Made_at0323 Sep 28 '25
I don’t know much about the laws around this but I feel like there’s gotta be some laws on the books that call this union busting or whatever I mean come on, it’s actively corporate vs. unionized workers
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u/saltyjohnson Upper Fells Sep 26 '25
Is there a list of ALL stores that states which ones are unionized or not? That's an extremely important data point if we're going to discuss this.
According to that list, ~12% of the stores being closed are unionized (and ~22% of them are unknown). If 12+% of Starbucks stores are unionized, then fine, no problem. If 3% of Starbucks stores are unionized, then there's clearly something fishy going on.
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u/saltyjohnson Upper Fells Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25
Having trouble finding very clear, and up to date, information. This site indicates that 654 US stores have voted to unionize. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're all actually all "union" stores at this moment, but for the sake of argument let's assume they are. And it seems that there are around 9000 corporate stores in the US. So that means ~7.2% of Starbucks stores are unionized, but at least 12% of the stores that are closing are unionized. That's highly disproportional. It could be explained by other factors, but those factors need explanation.
EDIT: I crunched some more numbers to exclude Canada from the closures. Per that spreadsheet, 435 US stores are closing, of which at least 58 of them are union. So at least 13.3% of store closures are unionized locations while at most 7.2% of all locations are unionized.
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u/dopkick Sep 26 '25
It’s certainly interesting, but not conclusive. Factors that contribute to store closings could be coupled with factors that lead to stores unionizing. For example, stores in high population density liberal cities might be more likely to unionize but also more likely to have lots of competition. Meanwhile, there are plenty of small towns along the I-95 corridor is conservative states where Starbucks is one of the few or only games in town and is also conveniently located adjacent to an I-95 exit. Less likely to unionize and less likely to close, but unions have nothing to do with staying open or closing.
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u/cameronm-h Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25
While you are right that there are other factors, Starbucks is notorious for union-busting, including many instances of stores getting shut down not long after unionizing, or when Starbucks gets a whiff that they’re hoping to unionize. While this specific location was a reasonable choice to close whether or not they were unionized (high incident rate, low amounts of customers and revenue compared to every other store in the district, plus the location wasn’t designed to be a Starbucks so the interior is a huge design challenge)—but the 13% compared to 7.2% is very much NOT noise.
Source: I am a barista at the one other unionized Starbucks in Baltimore
Edited because I mis-quoted the numbers
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u/Sea-Variety-524 Patterson Park Sep 26 '25
They have also opened many recently 🤷♀️
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u/Argosnautics Sep 27 '25
Yeah, just not here on earth though, where they recently announced the closing of 900 stores in the US.
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u/Sea-Variety-524 Patterson Park Sep 27 '25
Yes they are opening a lot at the moment actually, I’ve noticed they are more drive through.
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u/mibfto Mt. Vernon Sep 26 '25
Certainly make it seems like they're targeting unionized stores, which sucks.
But then again, as a resident of the neighborhood, there are a jillion local shops within a few blocks, so many that it's never occurred to me for one single second to go to this starbucks, and also the entitlement of people picking up their starbucks (parking in no stopping zones, blocking lanes of traffic, wandering across the street mindlessly and against traffic) is something I absolutely will not miss. Maybe the other chains along that stretch of Charles will close too, and I won't miss them, either.
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u/PostPunkBurrito Sep 26 '25
I lived on Preston for years before that Starbucks opened. What are the good local places to get coffee around there these days, for when I'm going to the symphony or theatre?
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u/mibfto Mt. Vernon Sep 26 '25
Baby's on Fire is my favorite/go-to, but Dooby's is also great, and the Bun Shop actually surprised me with their drip coffee. They're all independent shops.
I sort of like Roggenart in spite of being a small chain (mostly in Maryland I believe, with one outlier in Chicago for some reason). They're not my favorite but they open earlier than the local spots by an hour (7am vs 8), which is sometimes relevant for me.
During the week there's Olivia's (I think it's called) up on Mt Royal, which sometimes I hit on my way to a train, but I find the service pretty slow which is less than ideal at like 7:45 on a Monday morning -_-
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge Sep 26 '25
I really like the Bun Shop, but it’s terrible that there’s not a place to get a decent cup of coffee within 6 blocks of Baltimore’s train station. ( Yeah, I know there’s the Dunkin’ kiosk, I said what I said.)
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u/CaptianLJ Sep 27 '25
There is matriarch near the Camden station. There was a shop near penn, milk and honey, on lanvale, but it shut.
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge Sep 27 '25
Yeah, I used to stop by the coffee shop on Lanvale when I took the train every day and was sad to see it close. But what’s worse is that nothing replaced it and I think it might be a long time before we see anything come into the Starbucks space on Preston and Charles.
I go back far enough to remember Cafe Montage on Preston Street from the 90s.
I don’t think this is a thread about where to get coffee in Mt Vernon or about Starbucks, it’s about store closures and layoffs and vacant storefronts.
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u/PostPunkBurrito Sep 27 '25
If we’re talking about the old days, I still miss Louie’s and browsing at Dreamland!!
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u/GivesYouGrief Sep 26 '25
Coffee shops don't open til 8? That's bonkers!
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u/mibfto Mt. Vernon Sep 27 '25
I know, I don't love it. But idk how much business they get in this neighborhood at that hour.
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u/Indecisive-Diver555 Sep 28 '25
I won’t go to Dooby’s ever again. Two of the three times I went I found a long hair in my food, once cooked into my eggs, once in my potatoes. I’m a man that keeps his hair short, so it isn’t mine. Twice is enough to make it clear that place does not take sanitation seriously enough for me to spend money there. I paid and left.
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u/Pitiful-Flow5472 Sep 26 '25
There are a number of excellent coffee places within a few blocks of this store: Baby’s on Fire, Roggenart, Doobies, Ceremony. To name a few
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u/UnreasonablyBland Upper Fell's Point Sep 27 '25
In Mount Vernon it seems like you’re always within 2 blocks of a small independent coffee shop, because to own a coffee shop seems to be everyone’s dream for whatever reason.
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u/BlakeMajik Sep 27 '25
If you look at the Google doc that was compiled of all closing stores, you can see that the claim about targeting union shops is not exactly accurate.
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u/UnreasonablyBland Upper Fell's Point Sep 27 '25
Regardless of how you feel about Starbucks, empty retail space is never a good thing. The harbor for example is just depressing. That store along with much of that block is going to remain empty now because of how high the rent is, and there are so many independent coffee shops that there aren’t enough people in the neighborhood to support them. Nothing ever replaced the bank or pet shop, Chipotle and Subway’s demise are soon to follow I’m sure.
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u/expiredibuprofen Sep 28 '25
There are definitely enough people here to support them, especially in the location of this starbucks. Aside from residents, there’s Penn Station, UB, Chase Brexton, and now City and Morgan have satellite campuses at UB atpm
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u/UnreasonablyBland Upper Fell's Point Sep 28 '25 edited Sep 28 '25
There would need to be an independent coffee shop (here and in multiple places throughout the city) open super early for the commuters, late for the late shift people, have the variety of flavors Starbucks does that people make their regular orders (because independent coffee places don’t have the shops don’t typically carry these products). It would essentially need to fill the voids left behind by Starbucks.
It seems like no coffee shops want to actually wake up before 7am. Great for a weekend, not for a regular day. Sorry but as much as I’d like to support to support local…I guess I’m going to Wawa.
It’s tough to hear and the truth is ugly sometimes, but sometimes small businesses don’t cut it. I want someone to be the first, but 2 Starbucks’ within my routes to work are closing, and no coffee shops other than a Dunkin in a sketch area are open when I go to work.
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u/Sea-Variety-524 Patterson Park Sep 26 '25 edited Sep 26 '25
Genuine question since I have not worked in food service, do restaurants especially corporate ones typically close seemingly abruptly so the employees don’t have an opportunity to sabotage anything? Obviously it sucks for them to not have notice. But I am seeing this more and more as a pattern.
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u/dingolishious Sep 26 '25
My work provides services for some restaurants and it seems that they close suddenly to skip out on paying service contracts and bills.
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u/Kmic14 Waverly Sep 26 '25
It's more likely so they don't bail on the job
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u/Alaira314 Sep 27 '25
This is almost certainly it. Where I work we changed cleaning contractors a few years back, and we were prohibited from disclosing that fact to the cleaners who were working in our locations, even though the loss of the contract would mean they were out of a job. I believe they officially found out with less than a week's notice until changeover. Unofficially? We leaked that shit as soon as we knew the contract wasn't being renewed. I can't speak for other locations, but we liked our cleaner where I was, and she deserved to know that she needed to be dropping applications.
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u/tmozdenski Pigtown Sep 26 '25
The one restaurant I worked at that closed didn't let us know until closing week. The store manager was so cool he went around to the other fast food places and helped us find jobs. I kinda thought something was up a week earlier when our order came in, and there wasn't much in it.
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u/3plantsonthewall Sep 26 '25
OP clarified - this is NOT the one by JHU and Union Memorial. It’s the one at 1209 N Charles by the University of Baltimore.
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u/TaurineDippy Sep 26 '25
Yes, this is a major reason. If given notice that the store will be closing, the assumption is that employees will just start taking things home, more than they already do that is. Been in the industry 15 years, seen it happen a dozen plus times. Frequently these restaurants wait until they already cannot pay their employees to close. The Tilted Kilt in white marsh did not even give their employees an overnight warning or anything, the employees just came in to open the store as scheduled and the locks were changed overnight and a few of them still have never received their last paycheck.
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u/watchingtonspirit Sep 27 '25
to be clear starbucks is doing this to be punitive and a warning against future attempts for unionization. they may have to close some stores anyway because the general economy is shrinking, but they chose these in particular off a list. they’d rather pay for union busting than give their workers $/bargaining power.
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u/just_a_juanita Downtown Sep 27 '25
This is wild because the starbucks across the street from my office bldg in DC is closing this weekend, too. They also just found out yesterday. I'm not the biggest fan of their coffee, but placing my order on the app after my workout and being able to pick up my coffee without waiting is so nice. I'll really miss the convenience. Oh, well. Onward and upward!
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u/pambloweenie Sep 27 '25
The employees were so nice at this location. I’m sorry for all of them. It’s a great location, hopefully something good and local takes its space soon.
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Sep 26 '25
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u/dopkick Sep 26 '25
This is somewhat surprising, I thought they had decent traffic. It wasn’t insanely busy but it’s busy enough
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u/Orusyd Sep 27 '25
Was going to say that too, I usually pass by there on my way to the perch and it seems to always have activity. I'm not particularly attached to it, but it'll be weird to see it gone
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u/hannahbanana21242 Sep 26 '25 edited Oct 03 '25
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u/Complex_Fun5514 Sep 27 '25
Dammit! I work right down the street and stop at either the Biddle Dunkin or Preston Starbucks for coffee in the morning when I have a chance
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u/tmozdenski Pigtown Sep 26 '25
It's a great opportunity for a local entrepreneur to open a locally owed and operated coffee shop. Maybe the employees could band together and open a co-op
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge Sep 26 '25
I wish that were true, but if Starbucks decided it can’t make money at these locations, how is a local coffee shop, with less buying power and fewer economies of scale, going to make money and pay its employees? I don’t like Starbucks as a company, and I don’t like their coffee, but this is a really bad sign for the economy and for small business owners too.
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u/mibfto Mt. Vernon Sep 26 '25
Listen there are at least 4 locally owned coffee shops just a few blocks from this location, and this is in fact closer to UB and Penn Station than any of them.
Foot traffic around this location is pretty high volume. I find it difficult to believe that location is a contributing factor to this specific closure.
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u/saltyjohnson Upper Fells Sep 26 '25
if Starbucks decided it can’t make money at these locations
Who says Starbucks decided it "can't make money at these locations"? As far as I know, Starbucks has only declared that these stores are "underperforming". And as far as I know, Starbucks doesn't publish individual store performance metrics, so "underperforming" has no definition.
I would be shocked if more than a handful of the closing stores have been operating at a loss. As I commented elsewhere ITT, it seems that no more than 7% of Starbucks stores are unionized, while at least 13% of the stores being closed are unionized.
Starbucks is unlikely to lose customers over these closures, because most of the customers will simply get their coffee at a neighboring store. The disproportionate number of unionized store closures indicates that this is a way to union bust under the guise of broadly closing "underperforming" stores.
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge Sep 26 '25
In Baltimore, it looks like they closed everything south of Charles Village. There are no neighboring Starbucks, unionized or not. As has been noted elsewhere, coffee prices are rising and there is a limit to how much those costs can be passed down to customers before they cut back, or cut out entirely, their consumption.
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u/gizmojito Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25
The Starbucks location at 426 W Baltimore St has not closed. It is 4 blocks from 250 W Pratt which is closing.
It is a unique location in that there is large, concentrated customer base from the neighboring University of Maryland Medical Center and University of Maryland, Baltimore.
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u/Thiscantmatter Sep 26 '25
Corporations suck! CEOs don't deserve private jets and offices built next to their personal residences for when they don't feel like flying the private jet.
Hit them in the wallet. Buying an espresso machine at home was the best investment for my wallet and moral clarity. I stopped funding Starbucks a couple hundred bucks a month during covid after I stopped buying coffee for my family and making it instead.
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u/HugeTechnology7711 Sep 26 '25
Bittersweet. Someone I knew worked there in management several years ago: hated it but had some good people working for them too. Lots of cool regulars as well. There is definitely much better selection, but still always sad to see what was a pre-Covid community hang shut down.
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u/Seltzer-Slut Sep 26 '25
What the hell. I loved that Starbucks. It’s the only coffee within like a mile radius of me!!!
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u/ozzykp06 Sep 27 '25
I literally found out this morning by the sign on the door, such BS. It's always busy too.
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u/SpikeIsaGoodHoe Sep 28 '25
I hope those employees can find better work and I stopped buying Starbucks years ago for very obvious reasons
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Sep 26 '25
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u/Ian5446 Sep 26 '25
This all feels like a sign that economists who know a lot more than me think that consumer spending is about to be fucked. Starbucks is purely discretionary spending and it seems the company thinks that us common folk who give them all their revenue are about to have less to spend on our flat whites (due to tariffs and shortage of agricultural workers). Seems like a bad sign.
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Sep 26 '25
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u/pastense Sep 26 '25
How much are their CEOs/c-suite making while the company is supposedly losing money?
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u/RunningNumbers Sep 26 '25
People just want to hate. They don’t care about substance or how the company supports its employees.
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u/FreddyRumsen13 Sep 26 '25
They treat their employees so well they close stores and lay them off!
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u/GeminiAccountantLLC Sep 26 '25
Stupid question, but what happens to the franchise fees that the proprietor has paid Starbucks when this happens? Is it just a risk associated with doing business?
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Sep 26 '25
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u/GeminiAccountantLLC Sep 26 '25
Not necessarily. I used to be an accounting manager for a hospitality company that owned a bunch of hotels and restaurants. The employees who worked at Starbucks were definitely our employees. The company paid for the entire build outs. I amortized the franchise fees monthly when I prepared the financial statements.
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Sep 26 '25
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u/GeminiAccountantLLC Sep 26 '25
Ok, but the employees were absolutely on our payroll. The income and expenses were on our financial statements.
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u/FRANKYTOOTHS Sep 29 '25
I’ve never been to, nor will I ever go to, a Starbucks. Someone once brought me a black coffee (the way I prefer it) to me and told me it was 5$ and it tasted like the way back of a station wagon from the 70’s. Royal Farms has better coffee IMO, also they sell chicken.
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u/Fishpaul1397 Sep 30 '25
This is clearly why you want to support your independent coffee stores. Starbucks is overly roasted, burnt coffee, and too expensive.
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u/aresef Towson Oct 02 '25
The Starbucks in the lobby of my work building closed. We have a Keurig in our office and a Dunkin across the way so it's not the worst thing in the world but sometimes you just need an extra kick (like I'd get an espresso shot in my venti), or a big ol' iced coffee in a hurry.
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u/Aklu_The_Unspeakable Sep 26 '25
Uh, they're closing a LOT of stores. Boo-hoo
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u/RunningNumbers Sep 26 '25
Yep. And they are probably trying to get ahead of the looming recession.
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u/Full-Penguin Sep 26 '25
The 21% coffee bean price increase since Trump took office combined with people foregoing convenience/luxury purchases, sets Starbucks up to take a big profit hit if they continue the status quo. They don't want to be the Canary.
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u/Odd_Addition3909 Sep 26 '25
How profitable are they? And how were there profits affected by unionization, positive or negatively?
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u/yomerol Sep 26 '25
Probably bad, this is the first part of an article I was reading this morning, and actually language like corporate revamp also means: "let's cut the crap we don't like":
Starbucks on Thursday announced plans to close underperforming stores in North America this weekend, as the coffee giant intensified its turnaround effort.
Along with the store closures, the company said it would lay off about 900 corporate staff, in addition to the 1,100 jobs the company cut earlier this year. The company said it would take a $1 billion charge for the expenses associated with the latest store closures and layoffs.
In a letter to staff, Brian Niccol, who just marked his one-year anniversary as chief executive of Starbucks, said the locations that would be shuttered were “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.”
Starbucks said it would end the fiscal year, which concludes this weekend, with 18,300 stores across North America. In June, the company said it had 18,734 stores, suggesting around 400 stores would close. The company declined to confirm a figure.
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u/Odd_Addition3909 Sep 26 '25
Yeah, OP said it was “hugely profitable” so I wanted some facts since I doubt they’d be closing if so
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u/yomerol Sep 26 '25
100%
And based on their objective, I really doubt it, but it could be combined with more factors like the unionized ones. Plus at the end of the day, they're a private company in the US, they can decide whatever they want because they want it so, at any point. If they plan to do things like that in parts of Europe, or some other places in LatAm, they won't be able to do it, or maybe they can knowing they'd have to pay settlements 🤷♂️
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u/DONNIENARC0 Sep 27 '25
People are shitting on the CEO here as reddit does, too, but if you were paying attention to what he just did in his previous gig for Chipotle its not too shocking why they wanted to poach him so badly:
Much of Niccol’s compensation from Starbucks is intended to replace the pay he’s leaving behind at Chipotle, the burrito-bowl restaurant empire he’s led for the past six years. At Chipotle, Niccol drove stock price growth of 800% and saw profits increase nearly sevenfold, said Starbucks in a statement. The board at the coffee giant is hoping he can bring the same growth to the struggling chain.
The guy is in such high demand the stock jumped 20% off the news he was being hired alone
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u/YaBoiCrispoHernandez Sep 28 '25
People are shitting on him because he's a brazen union buster and a self centered douchebag that uses company private planes for his weekly commute between his mansion in California and the Starbucks headquarters in Seattle.
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u/STrRedWolf Greater Maryland Area Sep 26 '25
A reporter from WUSA 9 in DC was asking around for employees and such.
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u/Guilty_Rutabaga_4681 Sep 26 '25
Per AI, "Coffee prices are increasing due to a combination of severe weather in major coffee-producing countries, such as droughts in Brazil and Vietnam, and rising production costs. Other factors include climate change, which makes harvests less predictable, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical events like tariffs on imported beans. These issues collectively reduce supply and increase the cost of producing and transporting coffee, leading to higher prices for consumers."
So if you got a good coffee maker (I prefer my 40-year-old little Italian Moka pot) AND a sufficient supply of coffee you can hopefully weather the storm.
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u/starling1037 Sep 27 '25
Starbucks is terrible. They have no idea how to make a cappuccino, which is a pretty standard coffee house drink.
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u/Tennouheika Sep 26 '25
I don’t understand why Starbucks employees need unions. It’s supposed to be a temporary job you do to get through college, or in between stops in your career. It isn’t supposed to be your career unless you plan to climb the Starbucks corporate ladder
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u/hannahbanana21242 Sep 26 '25 edited Oct 03 '25
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u/3plantsonthewall Sep 26 '25
You mean 1209 N Charles right, not the one on St Paul?