Starbucks to Close 600+ Stores

From Designorati​.com:

Starbucks today announced that it will be clos­ing more than 600 stores in the United States dur­ing the remain­der of fis­cal 2008 and the first half of fis­cal 2009.

Pariah S. Burke (yours tru­ly) is an avid cof­fee drinker resid­ing in Hillsboro, Oregon, a sub­urb of Portland. Mr. Burke report­ed­ly drinks upwards of six cups of cof­fee per day while work­ing as a free­lance soft­ware indus­try con­sul­tant, writer, and pub­lish­er; he drinks even more, he says, on his annu­al day off. According to the Starbucks.com’s store loca­tor, there are no few­er than 10 sep­a­rate, com­pa­ny oper­at­ed Starbucks stores with­in a 1 minute dri­ve of Mr. Burke’s home.

When asked to com­ment on the announce­ment of the planned clo­sure of more than 600 Starbucks stores nation­wide, Mr. Burke is quot­ed as say­ing: “Yahoo and hal­lelu­jah, broth­er, pass the sug­ar! The infes­ta­tion of Starschmucks on every corner–and across the street for peo­ple on the oth­er sidewalk–is final­ly near­ing its end! Other, bet­ter cof­fee shops will hope­ful­ly be able to com­pete again.

“To para­phrase Dennis Leary, maybe now we can order some freak­ing cof­fee fla­vored cof­fee again. And we’ll again be able to use English words like ‘small,’ ‘medi­um,’ and ‘large’ to com­mu­ni­cate how much cof­fee we want.

“Let the empire of tart cof­fee served by pompous teenagers crumble!”

Read the press release.