May 11 (Reuters) – Starbucks has cut 61 corporate jobs in its technology division at its Seattle headquarters, the company disclosed in a WARN filing the company filed Thursday.
The coffee giant, under CEO Brian Niccol, has been executing a turnaround strategy, focused on improving metrics like wait times and reported customer satisfaction, helping sales, while profit margin recovery remains in question.
• The cuts were not included in Starbucks’ announcement last month that some technology jobs would move from Seattle to an upcoming office in Nashville, Tennessee, focused on the company’s supply chain.
• The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) filing, dated May 7, said the layoffs are not the result of a relocation.
• The expected date of the first separations will be June 20, 2026 with all separations completed by August 28, 2026, the WARN filing showed.
• Starbucks said in a statement that the laid-off workers were notified in April.
• The layoffs were previously reported by the Seattle Times based on an internal memo.
• Starbucks’ Chief Technology Officer Anand Varadarajan was hired from Amazon in December, after the previous CTO, Deb Hall Lefevre, left the company in September.
• As part of its turnaround, Starbucks has closed hundreds of stores it said were underperforming and last year laid off around 1,100 corporate workers.
• Starbucks had raised its annual forecasts after a quarterly results beat in late April.
(Reporting by Waylon Cunningham and Neil J Kanatt; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Nick Zieminski)
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