Starbucks will lay off 900 non-retail employees and close underperforming stores in the U.S. and Canada as part of a restructuring plan that will cost the coffee retailer approximately $1 billion for planned store closures, support organization transformation and other restructuring activities, according to a Sept. 23, 2025 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The net effect of store openings and closures will shrink Starbucks’ North American footprint by 1% in fiscal 2025, which ends this month. “We will end the fiscal year with nearly 18,300 total Starbucks locations — company operated and licensed — across the U.S. and Canada,” said Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol in a letter to employees announcing the changes. “In fiscal year 2026, we’ll grow the number of coffeehouses we operate as we continue to invest in our business.”
This will be the second round of layoffs this year: in February 2025 Starbucks cut 1,100 support positions and several hundred additional open and unfilled positions, following Niccol’s January 2025 announcement that the retailer was taking a careful look at how support teams are organized.
In November 2024 Niccol laid out plans for Starbucks to reestablish itself as the “Community Coffee House,” and in July 2025 he announced a new program that would “uplift” 1,000 stores across North America by the end of calendar 2026, adding back thousands of seats that had been removed from stores while introducing greater warmth and texture to their design.
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“These steps are to reinforce what we see is working and prioritize our resources against them,” Niccol explained in the letter. “Early results from coffeehouse uplifts show customers visiting more often, staying longer and sharing positive feedback. Where we’ve invested in more Green Apron partner hours so that there are more partners working at busy times, we saw improvements in transactions, sales and service times, alongside happier, more engaged partners.”
