Peet's Coffee plans to close 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 Peet's Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach locations confirmed their stores will close, with Friday being the last day of operations.
Many locations in the San Francisco Bay Area are scheduled to close.
The news comes after the American beverage company Keurig Dr Pepper announced that buy JDE Peet's, the European parent company of Peet's Coffee, based in Emeryville.
Union workers at one of the chain's Berkeley locations were caught off guard by the news, saying on Instagram that management failed to meet its “legal obligation to negotiate over the impacts of this closure.”
According to the headlines of the post, which was cross-posted with the San Francisco Bay Area Industrial Workers of the World account, 27 of Peet's Coffee's 283 locations are slated to close. The Peet's spokesperson did not say how many or which locations the company would close.
Since then, the union has met with Peet's management twice to negotiate, said Dino Solis, a union spokesman who has worked at the chain's location at Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way in Berkeley for more than 8 years, one of the locations slated to close. Solis said the union estimates about 400 employees could be affected by the closures.
The union is pushing for higher severance payments and for its members to be transferred to other local Peet's stores with vacant positions.
Peet's Coffee was founded by Dutch immigrant Alfred Peet, a German work camp survivor whose family had run a coffee roasting business.
The first location opened in 1966 in Berkeley. This inspired the founders of Starbucks, who opened the first Starbucks location in Seattle several years later.
workers in a peet's The Davis location became the first in the country to form a union in 2023. Workers at Peet's stores in Oakland and Berkeley Union campaigns soon followed, claiming that deteriorating working conditions led to high turnover rates.
The first time Peet went public on Nasdaq in 2001. It was taken private in 2012 and returned to the public markets on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in 2020.
JDE Peet CEO Rafa Oliveira said in a July statement statement that the company had achieved strong performance over the past six months “despite operating in a challenging environment that continues to be characterized by persistently high green coffee prices.”
