In the Western world, Starbucks are everywhere. If you walk past a Starbucks and decide you fancy a mocha caramel extra shot wotsit but the queue looks too long, you can pretty much say ‘Meh, we’ll go to the next one’, knowing that in 5 minutes you’ll be at another one of their establishments. I’m pretty sure London has the highest Starbucks concentration in the world, there’s definitely far more than in Manhattan. If you stand on Oxford Street today, you have a choice of 139 Starbucks stores within a five mile radius. So as you can see, there are quite a few.
But we’re all well aware that Starbucks has been suffering of late, especially in the US where their rapid expansion has resulted in overkill. They recently announced a mass culling of jobs and closure of 600 US stores over the next year and, whilst many people are enjoying the fate of Starbucks as a talking point, Zillow have raised the interesting question of ‘what does it mean for house prices?’.
The last two properties I have rented (one in Brighton, one in London) were both pretty much opposite a Starbucks, and I have to say it helped seal the deal when choosing where to live. It’s embarrassing to admit as no-one wants to look like a corporate fascist that goes out of their way to live near a monopoly coffee chain, but I do like frappuccinos an awful lot.
In the US, a lot of Starbucks were built in areas that were expected to become property hotspots. But then after the property crash, these new homes never materialised. Now people are having to worry about whether their local Starbucks is one of the 600 to be closed, and what that could mean for their house prices. According to the Zillow post, having a Starbucks in the neighborhood raises US property values because of the demographic the chain attracts.
Would Starbucks ever affect your choice of where to live? Or does that seem like a ludicrous question?
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