Starbucks Closings in Austin
Starbucks’ National Closings
The recent news of Starbucks’ announcement of shutting the lights off in 600 of their stores across America has spooked many and buzz about it has echoed across the Internet. For years, many real estate speculators have looked to the deep pockets of companies like Starbucks’ research divisions for selecting store sites as indications of viable economic growth. Economists have watched their coffee prices as indicators of local economic success much commodities like gas, metals and others. With these store closings, people even locally are saying that it’s the armageddon. False.
Starbucks’ Texas Closings
According to Starbucks, Texas will be experiencing 57 store closures, two of which are in Austin (1007 South Congress and 5000 W. Slaughter) both nearby newly constructed Starbucks locations. To put that in perspective in the national scope, Texas only accounts for 9.5% of all closings and Austin only accounts for 0.3% of the closings nationally.
The Impact on Austin
How does this impact Austin? It doesn’t… that’s a tiny little blip; businesses open and close here every day, so for those measuring Austin’s economy based on coffee houses and prices, we’re still lookin’ pretty good (not to mention that within a mile of my personal home, two new Starbucks have had their grand openings in the past months).
July 19th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Austin has so many excellent, locally owned coffee shops that I can’t imagine anyone would care. As far as I’m concerned, they could close down ALL the Starbucks and it wouldn’t affect my life in the least. And besides, I swore I was never going to Starbucks again because they charge for wireless access. Why go there when Quack’s, Genuine Joe’s, Thunderbird, Little City, La Tazza Fresca and others offer it for free and have coffee that’s just as good and often better?
July 19th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Exactly, it has little to no impact here, especially with new stores opening up. Not only that Austin is a perfect market for starbucks coffee, we’ll always have a lot here. Er, unless gasoline goes up another $4 a gallon.
July 19th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
My satellite office was opened last November. They (Starbucks for those unacquainted with my way of talkin’.) just received an award for being one of the best few in the region.
Their closing would impact me greatly. The region? Hardly.
Following Starbucks as an indicator has always baffled me.
A side note — if we could all run our businesses the way my satellite office does, life would be a lot simpler, not to mention more profitable. These gals rock beyond belief.
July 19th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Lee- you’re damn straight! Our favorite is Spider House and the owner Conrad is an amazing person. We came *this* close to having our wedding reception on the back patio, Conrad was super excited since it’d never been done before! Since you aren’t a SBUX fan, you may not know that they have moved away from a unique brand to compete with McDonalds and Dunkin’ by using unemotional words like “faster.” They’re losing steam and it’s going to get worse.
Pylorns- touche.
Jeff- you already know that we DO spend a lot of time at Starbucks. When I was in commercial development, Starbucks locations were seen as top indicators because their feasibility studies are unmatched. They base their locations in prime locations with an undisclosed income amount and growth patterns before they will even turn the lights on.
As for their prices, sure- it’s a perfect indicator. In some of their east coast markets and even in Seattle where the economy is slowed, they pulled back pricing (remember the headline “Starbucks offers $1 coffee) because they had to jump start their sales and get people re-addicted to their crack coffee.
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The bottom line is that despite whether you buy into Starbucks as a commodity, their closings in Austin will not even be noticed. Even if they closed 10 locations, we have so many PLUS we have so many alternatives as Lee mentioned. That won’t stop the bubble bloggers from freaking out though, so we felt called to set the record straight!
July 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Lani — Given the closings, would you agree they might’ve fudged a few of their numbers when making decisions to launch new stores?