Starbucks is preparing to shut 64 California coffeehouses as part of a 250-store North American cutback under CEO Brian Niccol’s turnaround plan tied to weak performance.
The reported closures stretch from Santa Rosa to San Diego and hit the Bay Area, Sacramento, the Central Coast, Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire. The 64 California sites amount to 2.1% of the company’s stores in the state, the New York Post reported.
Starbucks has not confirmed the California addresses one by one. News outlets cross-checked a sampling of the sites on the Starbucks app and store locator and found locations with no operating hours scheduled beyond this week.
The California shutterings sit inside a larger plan to close 250 stores across the United States and Canada in the coming days. Those cuts equal roughly 1% of the company’s North American footprint, a scale already detailed in coverage of Starbucks’ latest 250-store North American wave.
Company officials frame the move as housecleaning, not a retreat from coffee.
The California closures are part of CEO Brian Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” strategy, which debuted in 2024. The company is taking a $300 million restructuring charge and launching a $1 billion restructuring and renovation effort.
Starbucks says it is on track to retrofit and “uplift” 1,500 existing North American coffeehouses by Sept. 30. The message is clear: keep the stores that work, fix the ones that can be fixed, and drop the rest.
Chief Operating Officer Mike Grams told employees in a letter that the company had identified locations where it did not believe it could consistently deliver the experience it wanted for customers and partners, or where it did not see a path to acceptable financial performance. That standard, not a sudden collapse in coffee demand, is the stated filter for which shops leave the map.
Similar reporting has tracked the second Niccol-era store closure round as management presses the same performance test nationwide.
Starbucks told SFGate that coffeehouses set to close will have signage up this weekend to notify customers.
"Coffeehouses that are closing will have signage up this weekend to notify customers,"
Workers are not automatically out of a job. The company plans to transfer partners to nearby stores, and it remains unknown whether any employees will be laid off.
The list of 64 California locations comes from Starbucks superfan and data tracker Winter, who has spent decades trying to visit every company-operated Starbucks in the world. SFGate has noted his long-running project. Winter used the app to compile the roster of shops that appeared headed for closure.
That fan-built inventory, checked against the company’s own locator tools, is what put specific addresses into public view before Starbucks confirmed them store by store. Coverage of the California slice of the 250-store cutbacks has followed the same trail.
For customers, the practical signal is simpler. If the app shows no hours past this week, and if closing signs go up this weekend, that shop is on the way out.
Northern California locations reported as appearing to close include shops in Concord on Willow Pass Road, Gilroy on First Street, Hercules on San Pablo Avenue, and Lafayette on Mount Diablo Boulevard. Millbrae, Mountain View, Oroville, and Roseville also appear on the list.
Sacramento alone shows multiple addresses: Truxel Road, Watt Avenue, Elk Grove Florin Road, Calvine Road, and J Street. San Carlos has two sites flagged. San Jose’s location on The Alameda is listed, along with two Santa Rosa shops, a South San Francisco store on Gateway Boulevard, and Walnut Creek on North California Boulevard.
That is a wide band of the northern half of the state, not a single neighborhood problem.
Central California sites reported as closing include two Fresno stores on East Shaw and West Shaw avenues, plus shops in Freedom, Merced, and Soquel. San Luis Obispo shows three addresses: Court Street, Broad Street, and Madonna Road.
The geography runs from the Valley floor to the coast. Underperforming four-walls, not a single regional collapse, is the company’s stated reason.
Southern California carries the longest roster. Los Angeles addresses on the apparent closure list include Beverly Glen Circle, Wilshire Boulevard, North Broadway, South Olive Street, Center Drive, and West Fifth Street. Century City, North Hollywood, Panorama, Burbank, Calabasas, Chatsworth, and Pasadena also appear.
Orange County and nearby suburbs show sites in Aliso Viejo, Cypress, Laguna Woods, Rancho Santa Margarita, Santa Ana, Tustin, and Rowland Heights. The Inland Empire list includes Ontario, San Bernardino, Temecula, Upland, and Walnut.
San Diego County shops on the roster include Adams Avenue, Murphy Canyon Road, Copley Park Place, Kearny Mesa Road, and Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, plus Encinitas on Leucadia Boulevard. Santa Monica has two Main Street and Wilshire locations flagged. Azusa, Stevenson Ranch, and Westlake Village round out the southern list.
From the Valley to the beach to the border-adjacent suburbs, the pattern is the same: specific stores, measured against experience and financial results. Parallel reporting on California shutterings inside the nationwide restructuring has mapped that same statewide spread.
Sixty-four California closures sound dramatic in a single news cycle. They still represent only 2.1% of Starbucks locations in the state. The 250-store North American total is about 1% of the company’s footprint there.
At the same time, Starbucks is pouring $1 billion into restructuring and renovation and pushing 1,500 remodels. The company is not abandoning the café business. It is discarding locations it says cannot deliver the product and the returns leadership wants.
That is the Niccol-era bargain in plain terms. Close the weak boxes. Upgrade the keepers. Move trained workers where the traffic still justifies the lease. Related coverage has even tied the 250 closures to wider policy overhauls under the same leadership, another sign the company is rewriting more than its real-estate map.
Customers in the affected cities will see the signs this weekend. Partners are slated for transfers where possible. The app and the store locator already telegraphed which doors are likely to go dark.
Corporate America does not owe any city a permanent lease on a money-losing café. When a chain finally scores its own stores on experience and profit, and then acts on the score, that is discipline, not drama.