This is signpost about where the U.S. economy is right now. Starbucks isn’t closing hundreds of stores because people stopped drinking coffee. They’re doing it because the math around where people spend time, how they work, and what downtown foot traffic looks like has quietly changed.

The office data is the backdrop nobody can ignore with national office vacancy has been sitting around 20.7%, a multi decade high, and major cities are even worse…think San Francisco roughly 28–35%, Los Angeles 25–32%, NYC pockets in the high teens to 20s, Houston 25–26%, Phoenix 28%, with other big metros hovering in the teens to 20s. That’s not an abstract real estate stats, that’s fewer people in the buildings, fewer lunch breaks, fewer grab a coffee on the way in, fewer afternoon runs, and fewer reliable weekday spikes. When the customer base in a dense corridor drops or shifts to two or three office days a week, a store that used to print money suddenly becomes a thin margin lease with high labor and high fixed costs.

Layer that onto the consumer side and it makes even more sense. People are still spending, but they’re more selective. The casual, habitual splurge only works when budgets feel loose. When costs rise everywhere else like in housing, insurance, groceries people start questioning the $7 coffee more often. They don’t quit entirely; they just trim frequency, trade down, and get pickier about value.

So Starbucks is doing what any rational operator does in this environment which is cut the locations that depended on five day a week downtown density, and pivot toward formats that match how people live now with drive thru, pickup, and suburban and residential convenience. That’s why this is a signpost because it’s not just a coffee story. It’s remote work, urban demand reset, cost inflation and consumer trade offs showing up in one very visible corporate decision.