Starbucks Closing Hundreds of Stores

"The Starbucks franchise is downsizing from a grande to a tall. The ubiquitous coffee retailer announced it's closing about 600 of its U.S. stores, beginning this month. The swath of shuttered windows will chop away 5.5 percent of Starbucks' domestic fleet, 44 states (and one capital) will be left with a venti-sized void, and an estimated 12,000 people will lose their jobs.

Regionally, the South and Great Plains are worst off. Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama are all losing more than 10 percent of their Starbucks. Iowa, North Dakota, and Nebraska are hurting in the breadbasket.

Closings will hit little Orange Grove, Fla., the hardest. In a town of only 9,106, three Starbucks are disappearing-one for every 3,035 people. Of the bigger cities, Baton Rouge, La., is the worst hit. Nine out of 12 Baton Rouge stores are folding, one for every 25,505 people. Sources on the ground tell us that Starbucks expanded very rapidly and couldn't overcome a strong local competitor. Mobile, Ala., and Las Vegas are the next two big cities to be hit hardest.

As chronicled in Monday's Wall Street Journal, some folks are starting to realize that big, bad Starbucks wasn't such an evil menace after all. Save Our Starbucks campaigns are sprouting up organically across the country in an effort to keep the corporate giant in town. At this point, mom-and-pop owners must be questioning what they did in a prior life to deserve such cruelty."