Dallas needs more coffee
Coffee giant Starbucks to add 1,500 stores in the next five years, but where inTexas?
If you're stuck walking more than a block to your local Starbucks, then help is on the way: The Seattle-based coffee-porium will open at least 1,500 new branches in the United States in the next five years. There are currently 11,100 locations across the nation, and more than 600 of those are in Texas.
A spokesperson from Starbucks media relations team said that Texas was likely in the mix but couldn't share specifics about actual locations.
"Starbucks does not break out store growth forecasts by market," she said. But Starbucks' chief financial officer told the Associated Press that the company would "deepen its presence" with additional locations in markets where it already had stores.
Time for some guesswork. In Dallas, the area with the greatest proliferation of Starbucks stores, hands-down, is along Preston Road. Heading north:
- at Mockingbird, in Highland Park Village
- at Northwest Highway, in Preston Center
- at Royal Lane
- at Forest Lane
- at Alpha Road
- at Frankford Road
- at Park Boulevard
- near Shops at Willow Bend
That leaves valuable openings for Starbucks at Lovers, Walnut Hill and Forest lanes.
Other areas where Starbucks could deepen its presence — i.e., already has numerous branches — include Northwest Highway, Uptown and the intersection of Central Expressway and Mockingbird, which has a Starbucks on two of the four corners. Starbucks, you are missing Hotel Palomar and the corner where Mrs. Baird's used to be.
An employee at the West Village store said that it seemed unlikely that Uptown would get another store – "only because we already have so many here, but you never know," she said.
In 2008, Starbucks closed 500 stores that it felt were underperforming (some of which have been taken over by other businesses such as Taco Del Mar). One closure that hit its neighborhood especially hard, and therefore seems ripe for replacement, was the branch at the corner of Greenville and Martel avenues. The space has since been overtaken by Gloria's.
"We still hear from people that they miss that store," said a staffer at the Mockingbird Station Starbucks. "But then they say, 'Even though my favorite store closed, you’re my favorite store,' and then we cry together.
"I can see where they'd open a store on Greenville, but that might take business away from us. Besides, since Gloria's expanded, where are they going to put it? They’d have to elevate it over the street on pedestals."
With more Starbucks on the way, Dallas is seriously for real on the brink of a coffee renaissance, one that seems certain to beat the last time we had a whole bunch of coffee places open in town: in 1994, when Starbucks first came to Dallas.
