Starbucks is closing 16 stores over safety concerns.

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“After careful consideration, we are closing some stores in locations that have experienced a high number of challenging incidents,” a spokesperson told CNN Business in an email.

The stores are in Seattle; los angeles; Philadelphia; Washington, DC and Portland, Oregon will close at the end of July.

Debbie Strode and Denise Nelson, senior vice presidents of U.S. operations, discussed safety at Starbucks stores in a letter to employees Monday.

Our staff are seeing firsthand the challenges our community faces – personal safety, racism, lack of health care, a growing mental health crisis, increasing drug use and more, they wrote. Country, we know these challenges can sometimes play out in our stores as well.

Starbucks is closing locations due to safety concerns.

“Read every incident report that they provide,” Stroud and Nelson added, adding, “It’s a lot.”

They wrote that the company is offering active shooter training and other types of training to make employees feel safe in stores.

It also offers mental health benefits, access to abortion care, transparency around shift and store policies and more, the letter said. The company may revoke the 2018 policy and close toilets to the public.

When it can’t create a safe environment in a store, Starbucks will close it permanently, the letter said. In those cases, the company moves employees to neighboring stores.

A new era for Starbucks

The moves are part of a broader effort to revitalize the company, according to a letter from Schultz on Monday.

“We need to reinvent Starbucks for the future,” he wrote, adding that the company must improve the employee experience “with respect.” He added that based on the opinion of the employees, the company strives to create “safety, welcome and kindness for our stores”.

Schultz stepped in for a third term as CEO in April. Over the past several months, he has spent time with employees, listening to their concerns and gathering feedback. Even before he officially returns to the company as CEO, he is working to drive the workers out of the union by asking them to leave the union.

But the initiative of the associations was only growing.

In the year As of June 24, the NLRB has certified unions with more than 3,400 hourly workers at 133 Starbucks stores. They and 15 places on the association confirmed decisions. Selections are underway for dozens of additional stores.

Starbucks may close its bathrooms to the public again.
Even with pro-labor votes, unionized stores account for only a fraction of the 9,000 company-operated Starbucks stores in the United States. But Starbucks has made it clear that it doesn’t want workers to join a union and doesn’t offer certain benefits to those who do.
In a tweet, Starbucks employees questioned United Seattle’s decision to close one of its Seattle locations. Made in good faith.
And in June, Starbucks workers at a store in Ithaca, New York, responded by unionizing that their location was closing. The labor committee said at the time that Starbucks was making a “clear attempt to intimidate workers across the country” and was filing an unfair labor practice lawsuit with the National Labor Relations Board.

As for those store closings, a company spokesperson said at the time that Starbucks opens and closes stores as normal, without giving a specific reason.

“Our local, state and national leaders are working with humility, deep care and urgency to create the store environment our partners and customers expect from Starbucks,” a Starbucks spokesperson said in June.

In its most recent fiscal year, Starbucks opened 449 new locations and closed 424 U.S. locations, or about 5% of its total.

—CNN Business’ Chris Isidore and Ramisha Maruf contributed to this report.



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