Starbucks Is Closing Seven Downtown San Francisco Locations on October 22https://sfist.com/2023/10/03/starbucks-is-closing-seven-downtown-san-francisco-locations-on-october-22/It was a running joke during the 2000s and 2010s that there were way too many Starbucks coffee shops in San Francisco, and that when you’d go get some Starbucks, you’d run into another Starbucks before you finished your Starbucks. They’ve closed a few since their peak, but according to the San Francisco Business Times, there are currently 59 “company-owned Starbucks stores in San Francisco” (a total that doesn’t include Starbucks locations inside big-box stores like Target or Safeway, as those locations are licensed to other companies).
But there are about to be seven fewer Starbucks in SF. That same Business Times report broke the news Tuesday that Starbucks is closing seven San Francisco stores, with an announced closing date of October 22.
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... The Starbucks store locator still shows dozens and dozens of Starbucks locations currently operating in San Francisco, some within a block or two of each other, and a very large cluster of them near Union Square and downtown.
And all of the shuttering SF Starbucks are squarely within that cluster. (They’re marked in red on the map above.) Given that office vacancies are way up and foot traffic is struggling to return back to pre-pandemic levels, you can imagine why Starbucks is making this call.
The location of the stores is interesting. 4 are close together in a business area ... that has been seeing a decrease in workers. 3 are a little farther from that business area
and bordering on the Tenderloin (= bum-infested and less than safe).
