Southampton Starbucks to close soon

Recommend

Comment

Email this article

Print this article

Get news alerts

RSS Feeds

Share Digg Mixx Linked In Facebook Twitter Delicious

Caffeine addicts accustomed to getting their fix at the Southampton Starbucks on County Road 39 will soon need to find a new connection.

Starbucks Coffee Company announced last week that the Southampton coffee shop is among the 600 stores it plans to close in the United States beginning this month. The decision to close the location comes as Starbucks is in the midst of scaling back its U.S. sprawl and concentrating on expansion in European and Asian markets.

The other Starbucks shops on the South Fork—in East Hampton Village, Bridgehampton and Hampton Bays—are not slated to be closed.

With the local Starbucks outlets as spread out as they are, regular patrons of the Southampton store will feel the loss. That isn’t the case in many areas that are losing Starbucks locations, where the adage “a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks” is all too true.

It’s not clear exactly when the Southampton shop will be shuttered. “The timing of specific store closures depends upon a number of factors, and we will not be able to confirm an exact date,” Starbucks spokesman Mike Lenda said in a statement Tuesday. According to the Starbucks company website, closures will occur through the first half of its 2009 fiscal year, which begins this October.

The company said 70 percent of the stores that will close had opened since the 2006 fiscal year, demonstrating that Starbucks’ expansion in the past
couple of years may have been too ambitious.

The Bridgehampton Starbucks opened in 2000 after some opposition from local food and beverage retailers and residents, and two years later the Hampton Bays Starbucks followed. The Southampton Starbucks came in 2005, replacing another coffee shop chain, Chock Full O’ Nuts.

Employees at the Southampton Starbucks said that they could not speak to the press and directed questions to the company’s press relations department. Someone lamenting the Starbucks’s closure had taped a note on the counter at the store encouraging patrons to call 1-888-23-LATTE—the Starbucks customer relations hotline—to try to save the coffee shop. The note was signed “Loyal Customer.”

“I guess the $4 cup of coffee was not sustainable,” Southampton Chamber of Commerce President Bob Schepps quipped Tuesday. He also acknowledged that no business has had much luck in the spot on North Highway—alternatively called County Road 39 and Highway 27—near the busy North Sea Road intersection. Hiram’s Hot Dogs, Doobie’s Diner Run, Mediterranean eatery Paolo’s, and a few incarnations of The Greasy Spoon all called the spot home for brief periods in the past.

Mr. Schepps said the Starbucks was a difficult spot for parking, and that opportunities were missed to connect the parking lot with the Suffolk County National Bank lot or the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing lot. He cited it as an example of poor planning, and the pockets of difficult properties that happen as a result.

He added that he hoped the proposed Southampton Town moratorium on development along County Road 39 will address the issue.