Seven years after Starbucks first talked about opening one of its Community Stores in Philadelphia, the company says it’s finally preparing to launch the new socially-minded cafe later this year.
The Seattle-based coffee giant says it’s resurrecting the plan for the Philly outlet after a previous effort fizzled out during the pandemic.
The shop will open somewhere in North Philadelphia in the second half of 2024, a company spokesperson said. No further details were available.
Discussions about opening a community store in the city began in 2017 and a West Philly location was confirmed the following year. In 2019, the neighborhood association in West Philly’s Parkside neighborhood revealed Starbucks would open the shop in the ParkWest Town Center shopping plaza within two years.
The project was seen as an economic boost in the arm and a sign the neighborhood was on the upswing.
“Once you get a Starbucks, that is the cherry on top. That says, ‘this neighborhood has arrived,’” Councilman Curtis Jones, who helped negotiate the location, told Billy Penn in 2018. “It doesn’t mean that the neighborhood is about to be gentrified, it just means that the neighborhood is about to do well.”
But the store never materialized, and the organizations involved never revealed why. A Starbucks spokesperson said she didn’t have any information on why the previous plan fell through.
Focusing on urban customers
Community stores differ from the company’s typical cafes in that they focus on using local firms for construction and supplies, especially those owned by women and people of color, hire and train local young people as staff, partner with area nonprofits, and have space in the store for community events.
The stores are sited in “diverse, underserved, low-to-medium income” urban communities like Birmingham, Trenton, Seattle and Baltimore, per the company. It has 39 in the U.S. and about 150 globally, with plans to open hundreds more in the next few years.
Starbucks has worked to repair its image in urban communities since the April 2018 arrests of two Black men at a cafe at 18th and Spruce sparked a national furor over racial profiling. A manager called police after the men, who were waiting to meet a friend, refused to buy anything or leave.
Starbucks’ CEO came to Philadelphia to apologize to the men, the company settled with them for an undisclosed sum, and 8,000 stores in the U.S. closed for an afternoon that May for employee training on racial bias.
However, the company has emphasized that its decision to open a community story in Philly was not spurred by the incident.
The legwork for the shop had actually begun the year before and was nearly disrupted by the arrests, Rodney Hines, a West Philly native who was Starbucks’ director of social impact at the time, told Billy Penn.
So far, a donation to Project HOME
The community store program started as a pilot in 2011 with shops in Los Angeles and Harlem and picked up after 2015 with stores in Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; Brooklyn; and more than a dozen other cities.
Programs offered by community stores have included donations to a soup kitchen in Hamilton, Ohio, a mural by a local artist and support for afterschool programs in Washington, D.C., YMCA job training held at a Seattle store, and a grant for youth-focused nonprofits in Los Angeles, the spokesperson said.
In Philly, where the company has at least 43 locations, it gave Project HOME a $75,000 donation in November to support its Hub of Hope program that assists people experiencing homelessness, she said.
Project HOME is part of Starbucks’ outreach worker program, in which organizations offer services to people sheltering in its cafes.
