MARQUETTE - Marquette area residents don't have to worry about where to get their Starbucks fix for the foreseeable future.
Marquette's two Starbucks locations are not on the list of 600 stores scheduled to close throughout the year as part of a company-wide downsizing.
Starbucks announced earlier this month it would close hundreds of company-owned stores in the United States starting in July and continuing through the first half of the next fiscal year. But Starbucks didn't say which locations would be shut down, until now.
The company made a list of closing stores public on its Web site over the weekend.
A.J. Mikus, manager at Northern Michigan University's Starbucks location, said that store is actually owned by the university and was not at risk of closing.
"We're a licensed store, so we never really fell under that closing plan," he said. "The ones affected were company-owned stores."
The second area Starbucks is on US-41 in Marquette Township.
In Michigan, 17 stores are slated for closing, all downstate. The closest of those to the Upper Peninsula is a store in Gaylord. Three more are in Detroit, and the others are in Dearborn, Flint, Eastpointe, Fraser, Grandville, Greenville, Kalamazoo, Lansing and Lansing Township, Ludington, Novi and Okemos.
Six of the stores Starbucks plans to close are nearby in Wisconsin. The stores are in Appleton, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Madison, Marshfield and Wisconsin Rapids.
The move to close the stores is a turnabout from Starbucks' aggressive expansion plans. Traffic and profits declined recently at Starbucks as the faltering economy has many consumers re-evaluating spending.
According to press releases from the company, the closing stores were selected by criteria including that they were not profitable at the store level, and not projected to provide higher profits any time soon.
The closings are taking place across all areas of the U.S., and according to the company, about 70 percent of the stores scheduled to close had opened since the beginning of the 2006 fiscal year.
The company said it now plans to open fewer than 200 new stores throughout the 2009 fiscal year.
