How Much Will Starbucks' Closing On Tuesday Cost The Company?
SEATTLE (CBS NEWS) — How much will closing for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon cost Starbucks? It's a drip in the coffee pot, according to analysis of the company's daily sales haul.
A U.S. Starbucks location averages around $4,400 a day in sales, according to Nick Setyan, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan.
Afternoons are the slowest time for a Starbucks, accounting for 15 to 20 percent of its business, Setyan told CBS MoneyWatch in April. So each store would lose between $650 and $880. That's about $7 million across all 8,000 company-owned stores in the U.S.
"To put that in context," Setyan said, "we expect their total revenue in fiscal year 2018 to be $24.4 billion. So not much of a financial impact."
Starbucks is shutting down for the afternoon on Tuesday, May 29, to provide anti-racial bias training for its employees.
The decision to close stores to run the workshop was made in April, after two black men were arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks and partial video of the incident went viral. Police said they were told that the men asked to use the restroom but were denied because they hadn't purchased anything. They later released the men, saying there was no basis for a criminal charge. The incident led to allegations of racial bias and calls to boycott Starbucks on social media while protesters shut down multiple Starbucks in Philadelphia.
The coffee chain's leaders apologized and met with the two men, also reaching out to activists and experts in bias training to put together a curriculum for the chain's 175,000 workers.
The training program is "designed to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a Starbucks store feels safe and welcome." Starbucks said in a statement in April.
The training will be provided across the country, and will become part of the onboarding process for new employees, the company said. Some 8,200 company-owned stores in the U.S. will be closed. (Starbucks also has 5,700 licensed stores across the country.) As for which stores will be closed and when on Tuesday, the company has hours posted on its website.
"This is probably one of the most important transformational moments in the history of our company and we've taken it very seriously," Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said in an interview with CBS This Morning on Tuesday.
-- CBS News' Jillian Harding and Irina Ivanova contributed reporting
