Starbucks to cut 252 more Seattle support center jobs, WARN filing says

Starbucks is cutting 252 more jobs tied to its Seattle support center, and the filing shows this round reaches far beyond back-office headcount. The layoffs will start July 17 and are expected to run through early February 2027, with employees getting at least 60 days’ notice. The affected roles span finance, legal, brand, tech, human resources, operations and senior leadership, including nine vice president positions.

The move extends a deeper restructuring under chief executive Brian Niccol. On May 15, Starbucks said it would eliminate 300 U.S. corporate jobs in its third round of layoffs under his leadership and said the cuts were part of a turnaround strategy aimed at returning the company to profitable growth. Starbucks also said that round would carry $400 million in restructuring charges. A week before the 252-job filing, the company had already announced 61 tech layoffs at its Seattle headquarters.

The pattern is less about one-off cuts than about how Starbucks is redrawing its corporate map. In February 2025, the company cut 1,100 jobs and left several hundred openings unfilled, then announced another 900 nonretail job losses seven months later. Niccol told investors at the company’s March 25 annual shareholder meeting that Starbucks was ahead of schedule on its Back to Starbucks plan, even as corporate overhead kept shrinking. The latest filing says the separations are permanent and adds that Starbucks “will result in the relocation or contracting out” of certain operations or positions.

At the same time, Starbucks is protecting a different part of its corporate footprint. On April 21, the company said it would invest $100 million in Nashville and expects to create 2,000 support jobs there over five years. Starbucks said the new office would complement, not replace, Seattle, and that the majority of support teams would remain based in Seattle. It also said some Nashville jobs would be new, some would come from insourcing contract work, and some teams could move from Seattle to Tennessee.

For Starbucks workers, that matters because the people being trimmed are the ones who help set the rules and move the paperwork behind store life: payroll, legal questions, brand standards, HR issues and operations. Fewer layers in Seattle can mean faster decisions in some cases, but it can also mean more centralization, more relocation of work and less corporate slack when stores need answers on staffing, schedules or field support. Seattle’s job cuts now sit at the center of a broader bet that Starbucks can slim down at headquarters while shifting more of its support system to Nashville and keeping the rest under tighter control.