Starbucks announced the closure of 16 stores across the U.S. this week because of health and safety concerns, and according to leaked videos of interim CEO Howard Schultz, these closures will not be the last. The video footage of an internal meeting at Starbucks was initially obtained by conservative Canadian blog, the Post Millennial, and shows Schultz talking about the issues facing his employees, concluding that “this is just the beginning” and that there will be “many more” Starbucks store closures to come, including profitable stores.
“It’s shocked me that one of the primary concerns our partners have is for their own personal safety. […] We’re facing things the stores were not built for,” he said, adding that the major safety concerns are issues of homelessness, drug use and crime in and around many Starbucks stores.
Schultz then goes on to blame local government leadership that has “abdicated their responsibility in fighting crime and addressing mental illness” for many of the health and safety issues and said that “we are going to have to transform and modernize” to meet changing needs of the customers, though in the footage shown, he did not give more details on what those changes might be.
A Starbucks spokesperson confirmed that the video footage is authentic and was part of a larger, regular staff meeting as a follow-up to the letter sent announcing the imminent store closures.
“We regularly open and close stores and we’re always looking for better ways to serve customers,” the Starbucks spokesperson said as a response to the footage.
The 16 store closures happen to all be in cities run by Democrat leaders, though Schultz never explicitly made a bipartisan political connection during his critical remarks. Two of the stores that are slated to close in Seattle had unionized and one of the Portland stores was supposed to have held a union vote soon.
“Every decision Starbucks makes must be viewed through the lens of the company’s unprecedented and virulent union-busting campaign,” Starbucks union SBWorkers United said in a statement. “Starbucks claims that they are closing the stores because they are 'unsafe,' yet, the closing of the popular college town store in Ithaca, NY, followed a strike over unsafe conditions. Starbucks’ response was not to fix the problem but to punish the workers who had recently unionized. Yet, Starbucks still argues that this was not a response to the growing union movement spreading across the country.
Although Starbucks did say they would transfer the employees at soon-to-be-shuttered locations to new Starbucks stores and would reopen to “new locations with safer conditions,” employees and customers at the Los Angeles-area stores to be closed were “baffled” at the upcoming closures, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“There [are] countless times that I have been yelled at, cursed at, thrown things and harassed,” said one employee, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times on condition of anonymity because staff were not permitted to talk to the press. Staff were given two options: to either be transferred or to quit. The Starbucks spokesperson clarified that the company is working hard to assure that employees will be relocated to nearby stores.
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