Starbucks doesn’t want to be on every street in New York and Los Angeles anymore

[Optimus Prime]

Starbucks spent years trying to become an inescapable storefront on the streets of New York, Los Angeles and other big cities in America. Now that’s coming to an end.

Its expansion once seemed limitless. It was even a joke. In 1998, an Onion headline read “New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks.” A few years later, comedian Lewis Black riffed that he’d gone to the “end of the universe” in Houston, where he saw one Starbucks directly across the street from another.

But Starbucks is now struggling, and its strategy of saturating urban areas to draw coffee drinkers on their way to work in the morning has backfired amid competition, the rise of remote work and rising costs.

So CEO Brian Niccol, hired last year from Chipotle to revive Starbucks, no longer wants its stores to be right next to each other. Starbucks closed roughly 400 stores nationwide that are concentrated in large metro areas as part of its $1 billion restructuring plan.

Starbucks closed 42 locations in New York, or 12% of its total in the city. It recently lost its top spot as the largest chain in Manhattan to Dunkin’, according to Center for an Urban Future, a New York City think tank that tracks chain openings and closings.