Starbucks Closings ::: Women and Minorities Hit Hardest!

There's a long-standing, running joke -- and a personal fave... that a predictable NYTimes headline would be "World Ends: Women and Minorities Hit Hardest".


Guess no one told it to the folks at the Chicago Tribune.

Cafe closings hit minority areas

Starbucks lists 18 shops in, near city

By Barbara Rose and Wailin Wong

Chicago Tribune reporters

July 18, 2008

Starbucks has identified 18 stores in the Chicago area among the 600 nationwide targeted to close through March 2009, including several in minority neighborhoods that had counted on the green-and-white medallion to signal rebirth.

...

The closings include stores in largely minority areas in the south suburbs as well as neighborhoods on Chicago's South and West Sides. "Starbucks became symbolic of a community that was changing and in transition," said Earnest Gates, executive director of the Near West Side Community Development Corp. "To take that away, it's a blow to a community."

Word began spreading in North Lawndale about a week ago that the Starbucks at Roosevelt Road and Homan Avenue, open about 18 months, was on the closing list. That outlet, as well as another one slated for closing at East 95th Street and Stony Island Avenue, were built as part of Urban Coffee Opportunities, a venture between Starbucks and Earvin "Magic" Johnson's urban development firm to bring cafes to minority areas.

"It's horrible it's closing down," Phil Jackson, associate pastor at Lawndale Community Church, said of the location in his neighborhood. "We can't stand for that place to be closing down. It's jobs. We've got college students working there, adults that have management skills that can be seen and observed by Starbucks. They could run their own store one day."

Jackson said Starbucks must have known the store would need time to prosper.

"The people in the community have to make it family, make it a part of their own, and sometimes that takes longer than a year and a half," he said. "For Starbucks to look at all the communities that are already suffering, and then to close the stores that they are closing is really kind of hypocritical. [They] started the store knowing what the community was all about. You come here so you can uplift the community."

Starbucks said in a statement that it used several criteria to identify stores for closing, including those that were not profitable and "not believed to provide acceptable returns in the foreseeable future." It also said "consideration was given to the impact of the current and anticipated economic trends."

"We have always aspired to put our people first," Starbucks said. "This makes our decision to close stores more difficult, because it disrupts the lives of the people who have worked so hard to deliver superior service to our customers."

Tribune reporters Sandra M. Jones and Susan Chandler contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

I think some of these folks need to understand the nature of business. Businesses exist to make profits, to supply to a demand, not to "uplift" communities. That's the job of churches and charities.

Yeesh.