On a busy corner in Greenwich Village, a new coffee shop with a dark facade and a spartan interior hummed with life.
Baristas in black paperboy caps worked quietly behind the bar, tapping away at screens and at boxy gray coffee machines. Customers, who were required to order by phone, streamed in to pick up their drinks. There was no line.
By the doors, sandwich-board signs advertised syrupy concoctions with eye-catching names: iced coconut latte, iced velvet latte, pineapple cold brew, pink sunrise.
Above the entrance, two words glowed in white: Luckin Coffee.
“It’s different,” said Ari Birnbaum, 18, who traveled downtown from his home on the Upper West Side to try Luckin one day last month after learning about the shop on TikTok. “It’s cool. It’s sleek.”
It may not be a household name in New York City. But Luckin, which was founded less than a decade ago in Beijing and has more than 26,000 stores worldwide, nearly all of them in China, has dominated its home market with a futuristic retail model built around an efficient mobile-order system, inventive drinks and plenty of discounts.
Now Luckin has made it to the United States, the birthplace of Starbucks, the java goliath. The Chinese company has opened four stores in Manhattan this summer. The one in Greenwich Village stands a block away from a Starbucks that recently closed.
Luckin and Starbucks have been engaged in a great global coffee rivalry in recent years, as Luckin has surged past the Seattle-based chain in China. The next question: Can Luckin challenge Starbucks on its home turf?
Starbucks arrived in New York 31 years ago like a thunderclap, planting its flag with a 3,000-square-foot storefront on an Upper West Side corner and swiftly conquering the city. New Yorkers were enthralled by its cozy cosmopolitan atmosphere, friendly baristas and premium arabica coffee.
It opened store after store in Manhattan, many right next to existing coffee shops.
But Starbucks is no longer the advancing force it once was. Its sales are sluggish. It has struggled to adapt to the mobile-order era. And it has been buffeted by the arrival of smaller, artisanal chains, which in New York include Variety Coffee, Café Grumpy and the private-equity-backed Blank Street Coffee.
Luckin was founded in Beijing in 2017 and quickly dethroned Starbucks as China’s coffee king. It offers an abundance of creative lattes made with arabica beans and a gamelike app that provides users with an addictive feed of coupons.
Luckin arrived in New York on June 30, when it opened the city’s first two stores. One is in NoMad on Sixth Avenue, a block from a Starbucks. The other is in Greenwich Village near Astor Place, where for nearly 30 years a large Starbucks stood before closing last summer.
In late August, a third Luckin opened in Hell’s Kitchen, a block north of a Starbucks, and a fourth opened in the Financial District, within a few hundred feet of another Starbucks.
For Starbucks, Luckin’s arrival is an uncomfortable challenge from a company that the Seattle chain, in a sense, helped create.
Over the last quarter-century, Starbucks supercharged the once-sleepy Chinese coffee market, storming a country that had long preferred tea.
But the chain has since been humbled in China. Luckin arrived on the scene and, despite a significant accounting scandal three years after its founding that drove out its top leadership, jumped to the front of the pack.
Now Luckin has three stores for every Starbucks in China, according to the companies’ data. And although China remains Starbucks’s second-largest market, its market share there fell from 40 percent in 2017 to 14 percent last year, according to the firm Bernstein Research.
Already, Luckin has more stores in China than Starbucks does in North America. (With more than 41,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks still leads Luckin globally.)
Luckin’s footprint in the United States may so far be modest, but its ambitions do not appear to be.
Guo Jinyi, Luckin’s chief executive, told investors in an earnings call in late July that the company’s expansion in the United States would be deliberate and that the chain’s exploration remained in its infancy.
A Luckin post on Instagram that month sounded more aggressive, describing its first New York locations as “just the beginning.”
Luckin declined to go into detail about its plans for New York, but vowed in a statement to inject “new vitality” into American coffee culture.
Starbucks avoided commenting directly on Luckin’s arrival, but said in a statement that its stores combined “convenience, connection and craft — offering not just high-quality coffee, but a welcoming experience.”
As far as coffee shops go, Luckin and Starbucks have little in common.
Starbucks was long powered by the vision of Howard Schultz: to bring Italian-style coffeehouses to the United States that would be so-called third places, spots beyond the home and the office to gather with friends or curl up with a newspaper.
Mr. Schultz, who stepped away from the company’s management in 2023 but remains chairman emeritus, has suggested that the connection between Starbucks’s baristas and its customers has been essential to the chain’s success.
Luckin prioritizes convenience. Charm is not on the menu. Its customers should not expect to find their names handwritten in Sharpie on their cups, accompanied by smiley faces.
Luckin customers receive alerts on their phones when their drinks are ready, and they can pick them up without interacting with the baristas behind the bar.
Starbucks has struggled in recent years to adjust to the growing popularity of mobile ordering. Some stores have had chaotic rush-hour pickup lines that Mr. Schultz has disapprovingly likened to mosh pits.
The company’s chief executive, Brian Niccol, has promised that Starbucks will re-establish itself as a reliable “third place,” and has predicted its stores will soon look and feel quite different.
Since Mr. Niccol took the helm last year, Starbucks has ushered in plans to increase seating, hire more baristas and close pickup-only locations or convert them into traditional cafes. Aiming to provide a more inviting atmosphere, it has also scrapped a policy that allowed people to use Starbucks’s bathrooms without making a purchase.
But it is not clear how the shift will position Starbucks against competitors like Luckin.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, the Luckin near Astor Place bustled with activity as jazz played softly from speakers.
A smattering of people sat at three small tables, and a circle of young friends chatted in a corner, leaning over their phones. A churn of customers entered, collected drinks and left.
About a mile away, outside the Luckin in NoMad, Valerie Kwong had been drawn to the chain for a simple reason. She was tired of seeing American brands dominate.
“That’s why I would go out of my way not to go to Starbucks,” explained Ms. Kwong, 29, an environmental engineer from Jersey City, N.J., who was drinking a hot latte.
As the Luckin in NoMad hummed, a Starbucks one block south was quiet. Overlooking a street corner, it has the type of uninviting atmosphere that the chain is trying to pivot away from, with no seats or bathrooms for patrons.
For long stretches that afternoon, the baristas behind the counter easily outnumbered the drip of customers filtering through.
At one point, a woman looking for a comfortable place to sit wandered in. Unsatisfied by the lack of chairs, she turned around and left.
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