(Image: Sutabaka via Google Maps)
Starbucks is shuttering four more union cafes in Seattle including one of the few remaining stand-alone stores in the central city on First Hill.
The coffee giant announced its latest round of closures this week including the 1101 Madison shop. The planned early April shutdown of the cafe typically busy with area medical workers and people in the area for checkups, exams, and health care appointments will mark the company’s near full exit from Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District. Three other Seattle cafes included in the closures are also union organized. A fifth is not.
The company says the closures are due to factors including customer experience and financial performance.
Starbucks Workers United, which represents the company’s unionized workers, has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over the closures.
The long, dragged out exit of Starbucks from its past cafe strategies to its current focus on smaller, cheaper placements inside grocery stores in cities and car-focused drive-thru locations in the nation’s more suburban environments has left areas around Capitol Hill pocked with the detritus of the pullback.
Capitol Hill’s most stark example is the massive shuttered Starbucks Roastery on Melrose that the company suddenly pulled the plug on in September. Melrose roastery workers at the massive store, roasting plant, restaurant, and cafe voted to unionize in 2022.
Other wounds have heeled including on E Olive Way where All the Best now fills the old “Capitol Hill Gaybucks” building with pet supplies and services.
Starbucks has continued to cut ties to its birth city. selecting Tennessee for the location of some of its new corporate offices.
Meanwhile, our area’s most famous Starbucks neighbor is leaving the neighborhood. Madison Park’s Reed Estate resident Howard Schultz who led the coffee giant to becoming a worldwide brand and dabbled with political power as he toyed with a possible independent run for president, announced via social media that he and his wife are leaving Seattle for Florida as they have reached “the retirement phase” of life. Schultz says the Schultz Family Foundation will continue its philanthropic work in the city.
The Madison Park Starbucks is now one of the coffee giant’s few remaining cafes not inside a grocery or a medical facility in the area. Somehow, the Starbucks at 12th Ave and Columbia across from Seattle University also has survived the cuts.
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