Peet’s Coffee plans to shutter some stores, including at least two in Southern California, by the end of January.
A Peet’s spokesperson said in an email that the closures were a “difficult decision” and “reflect a broader effort to align our business with long-term growth priorities and current market conditions.”
Workers at the Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach Peet’s locations confirmed that their stores are closing, with Friday as the last day of operations.
Many locations in the San Francisco Bay Area are slated for closure.
The news comes after American beverage firm Keurig Dr Pepper announced it was buying JDE Peet’s, the European parent company of Emeryville-based Peet’s Coffee.
Unionized workers at one of the chain’s Berkeley locations were caught off guard by the news, saying on Instagram that management did not meet their “legal obligation to bargain over the impacts of this closure.”
According to the captions of the post, which was cross-posted with the Industrial Workers of the World’s San Francisco Bay Area account, 27 of 283 Peet’s Coffee locations are slated to close. The Peet’s spokesperson did not say how many or which locations the company would close.
The union has since met with Peet’s management twice for negotiations, said Dino Solis, a union spokesperson who has worked at the chain’s location on Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way in Berkeley for more than 8 years, one of the locations slated to close. Solis said the union estimates around 400 employees could be affected by the closures.
The union is pushing for larger severance packages and for its members to be transferred to other local Peet’s stores with open positions.
Peet’s Coffee was founded by Dutch immigrant Alfred Peet, a German labor-camp survivor whose family had run a coffee-roasting business.
The first location opened in 1966 in Berkeley. It inspired Starbucks’ founders, who opened the first Starbucks location in Seattle several years later.
Workers at a Peet’s location in Davis became the first in the nation to form a union in 2023. Workers at Peet’s stores in Oakland and Berkeley soon followed with union drives, saying deteriorating working conditions led to high turnover rates.
Peet’s first went public on Nasdaq in 2001. It was taken private in 2012 and returned to public markets on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in 2020.
JDE Peet’s Chief Executive Rafa Oliveira said in a July statement that the company had over the last six months delivered a strong performance “despite operating in a challenging environment that continues to be characterised by persistently high green coffee prices.”
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