Last week, Starbucks announced the closure of 1% of its North American stores by the end of 2025, resulting in sudden job losses for hundreds of baristas.
The closures are one part of a $1 billion restructuring strategy dubbed “Back to Starbucks”; the coffee chain will also be laying off 900 corporate employees.
Processing the news in real time, Starbucks baristas have made their feelings about the closures clear, filming their reactions and going viral in the process.
A Starbucks employee at a Washington state location posted a heartfelt video to TikTok last week.
“Starbucks permanently closing my store and leaving us jobless was not on my 2025 bingo card,” she wrote alongside a clip, which has more than a million views, of her hugging a coworker.
In a follow-up video, she wrote: “making a banana cream matcha to cope with my store permanently closing.”
In another video viewed more than 6 million views, one employee dances to Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us” on the counters and tables of the Starbucks that employed her before its imminent closure.
The announcement assured that baristas from closing stores will either be offered severance packages or transferred to new locations. But rather than wait for official news of their fate, many decided to take matters into their own hands, crowdsourcing their own list of shuttering locations.
On TikTok, a group of employees discussed their predictions for where they might be relocated in the shuffle. The big reveal: Everyone in the video was let go.
“We deserve better, and I’m sorry for every barista going through it right now too,” another barista captioned her video, claiming she was given just two days’ notice of her store’s closure.
Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents 12,000 baristas across 45 states and the District of Columbia, said it was requesting information from Starbucks about the planned closures.
“We expect to engage in effects bargaining for every impacted union store, as we have done elsewhere, so workers can be placed in another Starbucks store according to their preferences,” reads the statement published last week. “It has never been more clear why baristas at Starbucks need the backing of a union.”
Starbucks announced it’s closing locations where it doesn’t see “a path to financial performance,” and those it identified as unable “to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect.”