✉️ This story was featured in this week’s Coffee News Club.
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As part of CEO Brian Niccol’s ongoing “Back to Starbucks” revival plan, the coffee giant has been closing underperforming stores across the United States. In September 2025, Starbucks said it would close 400 stores, and last month it announced another 250.
Several of those closures have been in Greater Boston, Nikita Osadchiy and Samuel A. Church report for Inc. Starbucks has shuttered nearly 20 Boston-area stores over the past year (five of which were unionized). The closures mean the company now has only one downtown Boston location remaining.
Starbucks’ retreat has been good news for the city’s independent coffee scene, however. Rebecca Fitzgerald, president of George Howell Coffee, told Inc. that sales of specialty drinks at its two cafes nearest to now-closed Starbucks stores are up 30-35% on average compared to last year. Pumpkin spice lattes have seen a particularly large rise, Fitzgerald said.
According to Inc., other cafes reported a similar uptick in traffic while noting the difficulty of ascribing the rise specifically to the Starbucks closures. “We’re definitely seeing new faces, but it’s the ebb and flow of Boston traffic,” Thomas McManus of downtown coffee shop Espresso Love said. Starbucks said it plans to “resume growing its coffeehouse count in the 2026 fiscal year,” Osadchiy and Church write.
Read the full story on the Boston coffee shops replacing Starbucks here.
Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash.
