{"id":414800,"date":"2026-04-24T07:20:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T07:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414800\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T07:20:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T07:20:16","slug":"%e2%98%95-starbucks-hits-the-exurbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/414800\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2615 \u00a0Starbucks hits the exurbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember those jokes about New York City having a Starbucks on every corner<\/a>? Not anymore. Over the last several months, Starbucks has closed<\/a> roughly two dozen Manhattan shops and several more in Brooklyn and Queens.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Atoka, Tennessee, an exurb ~30 miles outside of Memphis with 10k people (up from less than 700 in the 1990s), recently got its first store.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Starbucks isn\u2019t just chasing population growth. It\u2019s becoming an exurban company because, unlike in denser cities, there\u2019s plenty of room for drive-throughs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goodbye to all that<\/p>\n

The pandemic changed a lot in this country, including fast food habits. University of Texas, El Paso professor Partha Sarathi Mishra, along with co-authors Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos, studied store-visit data<\/a> at Starbucks and a handful of other popular chains from 2018 to 2025 and found:\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Stores without drive-throughs experienced a drop in demand during the pandemic and didn\u2019t fully recover.\u00a0\u00a0
\nStores with drive-throughs experienced a temporary shock and not only recovered but saw their volume increase.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mishra describes this as a shift in demand volume: For Starbucks, it was as though 25% of total customers migrated from in-store to the drive-through.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean nobody wants to sit inside a Starbucks (the company is renovating many stores to improve their third-place feel). It just means that locations with drive-throughs are far more successful, prompting an expansion into areas where there\u2019s enough asphalt for people to wait in line in their cars.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems like they\u2019re recognizing the fact that people have changed their preference to more drive-through stores,\u201d Mishra says. \u201cSo the option is to open more in the suburban areas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

How deep will Starbucks spread into the exurbs?<\/p>\n

An extremely random website called Starbuckseverywhere.net<\/a>, operated by a guy who wants to visit every single Starbucks, tracks the brand\u2019s openings and closings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As of late March, Starbucks had opened ~70 new stores this year.\u00a0
\nThere were more openings in cities with 30k or fewer residents than in cities with more than 100k residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2026, Starbucks plans<\/a> on opening ~650 stores. On a recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Brian Niccol suggested<\/a> they could add ~10k more US stores in the coming years, a huge increase above the ~18k it currently operates.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The exurban future of Starbucks, then, might look a bit like its urban past. Except instead of a Starbucks on every corner, it will be a Starbucks off every highway exit.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udd17<\/a><\/p>\n

Weight, in tons, of a gigantic robo-arm that China-based engineer and influencer Fan Shisan created for funsies \u2014 or, based on a video<\/a> description he posted, \u201cjust to see if my friend could survive the ultimate slap!\u201d While he didn\u2019t actually crush his buddies with the massive machine, which it absolutely would have, he did get it to demolish a small Volvo with one swing using a hand-mounted controller.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some people just have too much time (and scrap metal?) on their huge robotic hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcc5\u00a0 On this day: In 1704, The Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in the colony of Massachusetts, debuted<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcf0\u00a0 Newsletter: Get calm, clear financial insights from The Daily Upside<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83c\udf9f\ufe0f\u00a0 Save your spot: HubSpot\u2019s former head of paid media is sharing his playbook for success in a live session<\/a> hosted by Marketing Against the Grain and HubSpot for Startups.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcf1\u00a0 That\u2019s cool: Take a virtual tour<\/a> of the National Museum of Natural History\u2019s exhibit “Cellphone: Unseen Connections.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udc07\u00a0 Aww: Clean your ears<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Remember those jokes about New York City having a Starbucks on every corner? Not anymore. Over the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-414800","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}