A lit storefront at night. Every one of these is a lease with an end date.
On Thursday, September 25, 2025, thirty-four Starbucks in New York City closed at once: twenty-five in Manhattan, seven in Brooklyn, two in Queens. By December, the Center for an Urban Future's annual chain census had the year's total at forty-two, roughly twelve percent of the company's city stores, and put Starbucks at 286 locations against 351 in 2019. The census was read as a story about chains leaving New York. The leases tell a different one. On June 30, 2025, three months before the mass closure, Luckin Coffee opened its first two American stores at 755 Broadway and 800 Sixth Avenue. Its store page lists twenty-two Manhattan addresses today.
THIRTY-FOUR STORES CLOSED ON ONE THURSDAY AND THE CITY CALLED IT A RETREAT
The September closures were part of a national restructuring, around 400 stores, and the New York list ran from a Columbus Circle pickup counter to shops on Lexington, Third Avenue and First Avenue that commuters had used for a decade. The Center for an Urban Future counted 8,314 chain stores in the five boroughs at the end of 2025, down 112 in a year, and the coffee category down 51. Dunkin' passed Starbucks and now has 623 stores. A New York Post report in December said five more Starbucks closures were expected early in 2026 as leases ran out, and that Luckin was reviewing more than a dozen spaces, including the small to-go spots Starbucks had just left.
Chairs stacked behind the glass of a closed storefront.
A $180 MILLION SEC PENALTY, A DELISTING, AND TWENTY-TWO MANHATTAN LEASES FIVE YEARS LATER
Luckin's record is not a rumor. In December 2020 the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that the company had agreed to pay a $180 million penalty for fabricating more than $300 million in retail sales between April 2019 and January 2020, through fake coupon purchases and shell companies. Nasdaq delisted the stock in June 2020. Centurium Capital, a private equity firm, took control. Five years on, Luckin reports more than 36,000 stores worldwide, added eight net new American stores in the second quarter of 2026, and has told the trade press it has no definitive timeline for relisting in New York, where it is now a landlord's tenant twenty-two times over.
The deals are small and long. Commercial Observer reported 910 square feet at 154 Bleecker Street for ten and a half years. Hoodline reported 1,200 square feet at 180 Varick for ten years at an asking rent around $150 a foot, in a space that had been a pizza counter. Traded lists 1,500 feet at 244 Eighth Avenue at $140 asking, 1,000 at 369 Lexington at $180, 1,200 at 755 Broadway at $210, and 2,000 at 366 Fifth Avenue at $225. The Upper West Side store at 2799 Broadway replaced a taqueria, not a Starbucks. In fact, a cross-check of the thirty-four closed Starbucks addresses against the twenty-two Luckin addresses finds no exact match. The closest is 147 Third Avenue, where Luckin signed a ten-year lease in March, next door to 145 Third Avenue, where a Starbucks closed in September.
THE LATTE IS TWENTY CENTS CHEAPER AND THE LEASE IS TEN YEARS LONG
The number that traveled was thirty percent. It appeared in the Post, attributed to nobody in particular. The itemized check is less dramatic. When the Greenwich Village store opened, Business Insider priced a regular iced latte at $5.75 against $5.95 at the Starbucks nearby. Luckin's $1.99 opening promotion was the discount everyone remembered. By mid-2026, Restaurant Business described the prices as roughly comparable and moderately cheaper, with an iced coconut latte at $6.45; a coffee blog that tracks the chain put drip around $3.80, cold brew around $5.20 and the specialty lattes at $7 to $8. The model is not a cheaper cup. The model is an app that orders before you walk in, a kiosk at the door, a 1,000-square-foot room, and a lease that runs to 2036.
Two lattes on a counter.
The pace is the point. A retail broker told the Post it "wouldn't be surprising if a year from now Luckin has quadrupled"; the count went from nine to twenty-two in the ten months after he said it, with a 2,000-square-foot lease at 366 Fifth Avenue signed and not yet on the store list. Starbucks, meanwhile, is phasing out its Pick Up format in 2026, with eleven more Manhattan sites set to convert or close. Every one of those is a small room with a coffee buildout already in it, and the only question on the landlord's desk is who signs for ten years.
WHAT THE ROASTER THREE BLOCKS FROM THE NEW STORE IS UP AGAINST NOW
Plowshares Coffee has roasted at 2730 Broadway for years; Luckin opened at 2799, three blocks north, in May. Irving Farm, Joe, Café Grumpy, Variety, Devoción, Ninth Street, Black Fox and Culture built their counters on the same Midtown and Village blocks where Luckin signed. None of them can sign a ten-year lease at $210 a foot on a promotion and an app. None of them was found to have invented $300 million in sales, either.
An independent coffee counter at work.
The chain census said chains were leaving New York, and it was right about the count. It was wrong about what a vacancy is. A closed Starbucks is a ten-year lease waiting for a tenant with a balance sheet, and the balance sheets lining up are not local. The awning changes. The corner does not come back to the neighborhood. If the next cup on your block is coming from a company with a fraud order in its file, that is the landlord's choice, and it was made the day the old lease ran out.
SOURCING
