Starbucks is joining the mass layoff herd: The retail giant is cutting 1,100 corporate workers.
The number amounts to 6.9% of the multinational coffee chain’s non-retail staff. Starbucks cites slow sales as part of the reasoning. The company employs around 345,000 hourly global retail workers, none of whom were impacted.
In addition to the 1,100 job losses, the company will be eliminating hundreds of open but unfilled positions, in yet another bad sign for the labor market.
Starbucks Reduces Its Workforce
The announcement comes from recently appointed Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol, in a public letter to employees released Monday.
The specific employees who are being terminated will be informed by midday Tuesday, the letter says. The company first stated its plans to issue layoffs back in January.
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Prior to these layoffs, the company employed about 16,000 global workers in “corporate support, store development, roasting, manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution operations,” alongside many more retail workers.
Starbucks Also Doesn’t Want Workplace Flexibility
In addition to the cuts, Starbucks is renewing a focus on in-person work, discouraging remote work despite its benefits for offering a flexible work environment to corporate staff.
In a section of the letter about “taking steps to bring together our North America leadership teams,” Niccol says that all “VP+ leaders in North America” will need to come into the office at least three days a week moving forward.
He also adds that “hiring for future roles will require partners to be Seattle or Toronto based, except for enterprise designated remote positions.”
This isn’t a drastic rollback, even if it does signal Starbucks intentions to limit remote roles in the future: “Generally, partners working remotely in director and below roles today will keep their remote status,” the letter reassures.
Back in October, Starbucks made a few headlines for threatening to lay off workers who didn’t return to the office, despite CEO Niccol’s remote lifestyle in his California home.
The Labor Market Continues to Weaken
The news follows a years-long trend of layoffs across multiple industries. In 2025 alone, we’ve seen layoffs at Microsoft, Meta, and Microsoft again.
Meanwhile, Google has offered voluntary buyouts, signalling its own interest in reducing its workforce in the near future.
In some cases, trust in AI advancements may be one reason for the jump in layoffs: HR software platform Workday noted a refocus that included in AI during its own layoffs, which saw 8.5% of its workforce pushed out.
We’ve rounded up some of the best remote jobs to apply to this month, along with an evergreen list of potential remote job boards to check out. Mark Zuckerberg may have put it best, however, when announcing that 5% of Meta’s workforce would be slashed: “This is going to be an intense year.”
