Remember those jokes about New York City having a Starbucks on every corner? Not anymore. Over the last several months, Starbucks has closed roughly two dozen Manhattan shops and several more in Brooklyn and Queens.
Meanwhile, Atoka, Tennessee, an exurb ~30 miles outside Memphis with 10k people (up from less than 700 in the 1990s), recently got its first store.
But Starbucks isn’t just chasing population growth. It’s becoming an exurban company because, unlike in denser cities, there’s plenty of room for drive-throughs.
Goodbye to all that
The pandemic changed a lot in this country, including fast food habits. University of Texas, El Paso professor Partha Sarathi Mishra, along with co-authors Sunil Chopra and Ioannis Stamatopoulos, studied store-visit data at Starbucks and a handful of other popular chains from 2018 to 2025 and found:
- Stores without drive-throughs experienced a drop in demand during the pandemic and didn’t fully recover.
- Stores with drive-throughs experienced a temporary shock and not only recovered but saw their volume increase.
Mishra describes this as a shift in demand volume: For Starbucks, it was as though 25% of total customers migrated from in-store to the drive-through.
That doesn’t mean nobody wants to sit inside a Starbucks (the company is renovating many stores to improve their third place feel). It just means that locations with drive-throughs are far more successful, prompting an expansion into areas where there’s enough asphalt for people to wait in line in their cars.
“It seems like they’re recognizing the fact that people have changed their preference to more drive-through stores,” Mishra says. “So the option is to open more in the suburban areas.”
How deep will Starbucks spread into the exurbs?
An extremely random website called Starbuckseverywhere.net, operated by a guy who wants to visit every single Starbucks, tracks the brand’s openings and closings.
- As of late March, Starbucks had opened ~70 new stores this year.
- There were more openings in cities with 30k or fewer residents than in cities with more than 100k residents.
In 2026, Starbucks plans on opening ~650 stores. On a recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Brian Niccol suggested they could add ~10k more US stores in the coming years, a huge increase above the ~18k it currently operates.
The exurban future of Starbucks, then, might look a bit like its urban past. Except instead of a Starbucks on every corner, it will be a Starbucks off every highway exit.
