#Starbucks to fast-track pickup-only stores amid $3.2 billion loss

Starbucks is gulping hard.

The Seattle-based java giant just announced that the pandemic will cost it up to $3.2 billion in sales in the quarter ending June 28. Its shares slid by more than 4 percent on the news.

But Starbucks has a plan to increase business in a post-pandemic world.

It’s leaning into a new type of store, a pickup only joint, that it has been testing in the Big Apple and in Toronto for the past seven months and had planned to slowly roll out over the next three to five years.

Now the plan is to fast-track these stores, which are located near full-service Starbucks cafés or can be added to those stores, the company said.

In New York City, Starbucks will be adding a second pickup-only store near Grand Central Terminal “in the near future,” the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. There is already one at Penn Plaza by Penn Station.

“Starbucks Pickup stores will.. better serve ‘on-the-go’ customers while reducing crowding in our cafés, thereby improving the ‘sit-and-stay’ experience for ‘third place’ occasions,” the company said.