by LAREIGN WARD, Press Argus-Courier Staff Friday, July 18, 2008 2:28 PM CDT
Employees of the Starbucks coffee shop in Van Buren have been notified the store will close July 27.
The store will be one of the first 50 to be shuttered after the Seattle-based company announced plans to close 600 underperforming stores between now and the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.
The Van Buren franchise, located at Arkansas 59 and Rena Road, opened in November 2006.
On Wednesday, Manager Jeff Griffith said the employees received word of the closure the night of July 10, a day before Starbucks issued a news release announcing the stores that were closing.
He said the store employs 12 or 13 people, some of whom will be transferring to other locations. The nearest Starbucks is on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith.
Sounding apologetic, Griffith said he's "not really supposed to say anything about" the closure and referred further questions to Starbucks media relations.
A Starbucks representative responded to a message from the Press Argus-Courier but said she was only a company representative and not an official spokesperson and therefore could not be quoted in the press.
A news release on www.starbucks.com included the following statement in regards to store closings:
"The stores identified for closure are spread across all major U.S. markets with approximately 70 percent of them opened since the beginning of fiscal 2006. The executive and field leadership teams used several criteria to identify stores for closure that included locations that were not profitable at the store level and not projected to provide acceptable returns in the foreseeable future. In addition to site and market-specific criteria, consideration was given to the impact of current and anticipated economic trends."
The Van Buren store will close for good at 10 p.m. July 27, a Sunday. Future store closings will be announced each month on the Starbucks Web site.
Another local business is already closed, but for a different reason: Granny's Cottage Cafe on Main Street received notice June 27 that they were being shut down for failing to pay sales tax. On July 8, they closed their doors, and the cafe site is currently decorated with numerous pink signs from the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration announcing the closure.
Tom Atchley, administrator for the state excise tax office, said there was a $1,407 tax lien out on the property. Sarah Badeaux and Terry Ramsey are listed as the business owners, he said.
No further information was available from the tax office.
