Schultz blames Seattle mayor as Starbucks shifts jobs to Nashville

Howard Schultz used Starbucks’ latest expansion to reopen a Seattle grudge, blaming Mayor Katie B. Wilson for what he called the city’s decline just as the coffee giant committed $100 million to a Southeast corporate office in Nashville.

The move is not a clean break from Seattle. Starbucks said the Nashville office will complement, not replace, its global and North America headquarters in Seattle, and that the majority of support teams will remain there. Even so, the company expects the Tennessee office to grow into as many as 2,000 jobs over the next several years, with some select technology teams shifting south while others stay in Seattle.

Starbucks said the Nashville office will open first in a temporary location in the Gulch in May 2026 before moving into Peabody Union in 2027. Company leaders have framed the site as part of a broader growth strategy tied to talent access, supplier proximity and stronger reach across the South and East United States. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell both praised the investment, underscoring how aggressively Nashville is selling itself as a destination for corporate office growth.

For Seattle, the announcement lands in a city already wrestling with the same issues Schultz pointed to: homelessness, budget deficits and a slow hiring cycle. Seattle’s 2026 budget was approved with added spending for affordable housing and homelessness response, but city officials have also faced scrutiny over budget pressures and the region’s homelessness system. Schultz’s attack on Wilson, then, was more than a personal broadside. It fit a larger argument about whether Seattle still offers the stability, cost structure and civic climate that major employers want.

Wilson, elected in 2025 and taking office in January 2026, entered office after making her name as a longtime transit advocate and community organizer. Her relationship with Starbucks has already been combative. In November 2025, she joined Starbucks workers on a picket line and urged a boycott, telling striking baristas, “I’m not buying Starbucks and you should not either.” That history makes the company’s Nashville shift read as both a business decision and a political signal.

Starbucks is still anchored in Seattle, and the company insists its core support workforce remains there. But the new office in Nashville shows where the growth is heading: toward a more distributed corporate map, with the Southeast gaining jobs, investment and influence that once would have been assumed to stay in coffee’s original corporate home.