Peet's Coffee plans to close some stores by the end of January, including at least two in Southern California.
A Peet's spokesman 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 the Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach Peet locations confirmed their stores are closed and Friday is the last day of business.
Many locations in the San Francisco Bay Area are scheduled to close.
The news comes after American beverage company Keurig Dr. Pepper announced this purchase JDE Peet's, the European parent company of Peet's Coffee based in Emeryville.
Unionized workers at one of the chain's Berkeley locations were surprised by the news, saying on Instagram that management had failed in its “legal obligation to negotiate the impact of this closure.”
According to the captions of the post posted using the Industrial Workers of the World account in the San Francisco Bay Area, 27 of 283 Peet's Coffee locations are scheduled to close. The Peet's spokesman did not say how many or which locations the company would close.
The union has met with Peet's management twice since then to negotiate, said Dino Solis, a union spokesman who worked for more than eight years at the chain's location at Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way in Berkeley, one of the locations scheduled to close. Solis said the union estimates about 400 employees could be affected by the closures.
The union is pushing for larger severance packages and for its members to be reassigned to other local Peet's stores with vacancies.
Peet's Coffee was founded by Dutch immigrant Alfred Peet, a German labor camp survivor whose family had run a coffee roasting business.
The first location opened in Berkeley in 1966. It inspired the founders of Starbucks, who opened the first Starbucks location in Seattle a few years later.
Workers at a Peets The Davis location was the first in the country to form a union in 2023. Workers at Peet's stores in Oakland and Berkeley Union action soon followed on the grounds that deteriorating working conditions were leading to high turnover rates.
Peet was first public on the Nasdaq in 2001. It was awarded Private in 2012 and returned to the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in 2020.
Rafa Oliveira, managing director of JDE Peet, said in a July opinion that the company has delivered a strong performance over the last six months, “despite operating in a challenging environment that continues to be characterized by persistently high green coffee prices.”
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