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    Workers at REI Store in Manhattan Seek to Form Retailer’s Only Union

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    In filing for a union election, employees of the outdoor equipment retailer cited safety during the pandemic, among other concerns.Employees at an REI store in Manhattan filed for a union election on Friday, making the outdoor equipment and apparel retailer the latest prominent service-industry employer whose workers have sought to unionize.Amazon employees in Bessemer, Ala., rejected a union in an election last year, though the National Labor Relations Board later threw out the result, citing improprieties on the part of the company, and ordered a new election to begin next month.In December, workers at two Starbucks stores in Buffalo voted to unionize, making them the only company-owned Starbucks locations in the country with a union. Employees at about 20 other Starbucks have since filed for union elections.The filing at the REI store in SoHo asked the labor board for an election involving about 115 employees, who are seeking to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the same union that has overseen the union campaign at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama.In addition to filing for the election, the REI employees have asked for voluntary recognition of their union, which would make a vote unnecessary.Like Starbucks, REI, a consumer cooperative made up of customers who buy lifetime memberships for $20, cultivates a progressive image. REI’s website says that the cooperative believes in “putting purpose before profits” and that it invests more than 70 percent of its profits “back into the outdoor community” through initiatives like dividends to members and employee profit-sharing.The site also says that REI closes all of its roughly 170 stores, none of which are currently unionized, on Black Friday to allow employees to spend the day with family and friends.The retailer has more than 15,000 employees in the United States, compared with more than 230,000 at roughly 9,000 U.S. Starbucks locations that are owned by the company.In a statement, Graham Gale, an employee involved in union organizing at the SoHo REI store, said the campaign was partly a response to “a tangible shift in the culture at work that doesn’t seem to align with the values that brought most of us here.” The statement also pointed to “the new struggle of facing unsafe working conditions during a global pandemic.”In a follow-up text, Mx. Gale, who prefers gender-neutral courtesy titles and pronouns, said REI declined to bring back some long-tenured employees who had been outspoken about workplace concerns after the retailer temporarily closed its stores in 2020.Since the beginning of the pandemic, some REI employees have criticized the retailer over what they say are insufficient safety protocols, including a lack of transparency over which employees have tested positive for Covid and a decision to relax its masking policy. The retailer has said that it follows relevant guidance from state and federal health authorities, but it has adjusted some policies as it faced criticism.Responding to the union campaign in Manhattan, REI said in a statement: “We respect the rights of our employees to speak and act for what they believe — and that includes the rights of employees to choose or refuse union representation. However, we do not believe placing a union between the co-op and its employees is needed or beneficial.”The statement went on to say that the co-op was committed to working with employees at the SoHo store to resolve their concerns.Despite the organizing efforts at companies like Amazon and Starbucks last year, membership in unions declined to 10.3 percent of the work force, matching its lowest figure in Labor Department records that date back to 1983. More

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    Unionizing Starbucks, Inspired by Bernie Sanders

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    The liberal workers the company has long attracted are expanding a union campaign to other cities after a landmark victory in Buffalo.Maggie Carter, a Starbucks barista in Knoxville, Tenn., is a warm and reassuring presence who says she is keen to “go the extra mile” for customers.She may also be a nightmare for Starbucks executives.As a union organizing campaign that began in Buffalo and produced the company’s only two unionized U.S. stores spreads to other cities, it is being driven by workers like Ms. Carter: young, well educated, politically liberal.Ms. Carter, who began circulating union cards at her store not long after the results of the Buffalo elections were announced last month, studies broadcast journalism at the University of Tennessee. She is passionate about climate change, fighting racism and labor rights. And her political hero is Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent.“Bernie Sanders is my everything,” Ms. Carter said. “I love him more than anything.”Perhaps more disconcertingly for Starbucks as it tries to contain the union campaign, Ms. Carter appears to be representative of the kinds of people the company has hired over the years to reinforce its progressive branding.Labor experts say that in seeking such employees Starbucks may have built a work force that is more inclined to unionize and to be energized by the Buffalo campaign.“If you think about the kinds of employees they have, the stereotype of people that work there seems to be true — a lot of young people, Bernie supporters, D.S.A. types,” said John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “These are the kinds of people who can take this and run with it. It could be in Knoxville and Arizona just as easily as in San Francisco and Manhattan.”A Starbucks spokesman, Reggie Borges, said that the company was not anti-union but “pro-partner,” as it refers to employees, and that it had historically made changes in response to input from workers, making a union unnecessary.With more than 230,000 employees at roughly 9,000 company-operated stores across the country, Starbucks employs plenty of older workers, conservative-leaning workers and those with a high school diploma or less. Some who were heavily involved in the Buffalo campaign had never been to college.But at least compared with other food and retail establishments, Starbucks customers tend to be liberal and well educated, and the company’s hiring appears to reflect those demographics. The company’s annual report plays up its employees as “significant contributors to our success as a global brand that leads with purpose.”Starbucks allows employees who work at least 20 hours a week to obtain health coverage, more generous than most competitors, and has said it will increase average pay for hourly employees to nearly $17 an hour by this summer, well above the industry norm. The company also offers to pay the tuition of employees admitted to pursue an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University, helping it attract workers with college aspirations.The Status of U.S. JobsMore Workers Quit Than Ever: A record number of Americans — more than 4.5 million people — ​​voluntarily left their jobs in November.Jobs Report: The American economy added 210,000 jobs in November, a slowdown from the prior month.Analysis: The number of new jobs added in November was below expectations, but the report shows that the economy is on the right track.Jobless Claims Plunge: Initial unemployment claims for the week ending Nov. 20 fell to 199,000, their lowest point since 1969.Such people, in turn, tend to be sympathetic to unions and a variety of social activism. A recent Gallup poll found that people under 35 or who are liberal are substantially more likely than others to support unions.Several Starbucks workers seeking to organize unions in Buffalo; Boston; Chicago; Seattle; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tallahassee, Fla.; and the Denver area appeared to fit this profile, saying they were either strong supporters of Mr. Sanders and other progressive politicians, had attended college or both. Most were under 30.“I’ve been involved in political organizing, the Bernie Sanders campaign,” said Brick Zurek, a leader of a union campaign at a Starbucks in Chicago. “That gave me a lot of skill.” Mx. Zurek, who uses gender-neutral courtesy titles and pronouns, also said they had a bachelor’s degree.Len Harris, who has helped lead a campaign at a Starbucks near Denver, said that “I admire the progressivism, the sense of community” of politicians like Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. She said that she had graduated from college and that she was awaiting admissions decisions for graduate school.And most union supporters have drawn inspiration from their colleagues in Buffalo. Sydney Durkin and Rachel Ybarra, who are helping to organize a Starbucks in Seattle, said workers at their store discussed the Buffalo campaign almost daily as it unfolded and that one reached out to the union after the National Labor Relations Board announced the initial results of the Buffalo elections in December. (The union’s second victory was announced Monday, after the labor board resolved ballot challenges.)Ms. Ybarra said the victory showed workers it was possible to unionize despite company opposition. “The Buffalo folks became superheroes,” she said. “A lot of us spent so much time being afraid of retaliation — none of us could afford to lose our jobs, have our hours cut.”Since three Buffalo-area stores filed for union elections in late August, workers have filed for elections in at least 15 Starbucks stores nationwide. At least 10 of the filings came after the union victory in Buffalo. “It was the day Buffalo announced they had a won a union that I said, ‘I’m going to try to unionize my store,’” Ms. Harris recalled.More than 15 stores in 10 cities have filed for union elections.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMr. Logan, the labor studies professor, said this pattern might be turning the conventional wisdom about labor organizing on its head. Unions have traditionally preferred to aim at companies with a relatively small number of large workplaces because unionizing these sites creates economic leverage: Striking at one of a dozen large factories can disrupt a company’s operations, while striking at one out of 9,000 stores makes no difference to a company’s bottom line.But over the past few decades, victories at large, high-profile job sites have been less common — unions have lost elections at Boeing, Nissan, Volkswagen and Amazon facilities, though the labor board later overturned the Amazon result and called a new election. The Starbucks campaign shows that focusing on small workplaces at a high-profile company may be more effective, because a victory can build momentum nationwide.“In terms of creating a moment for unions, if you organized 100 stores it would be the biggest thing that happened in 50 years,” Mr. Logan said. Even if the direct economic impact on Starbucks is minor, he added, the media attention and political pressure on the company could be enormous.Richard Bensinger, who oversees Starbucks organizing for the union representing its employees, Workers United, said in an interview that the goal of the campaign was to build support among workers nationally, to rally public opinion and ultimately to pressure the company to stay neutral so that any store whose employees wanted a union could easily get one.“The real question is getting the country to stand up for David, not Goliath,” Mr. Bensinger said. “Every day we’re getting more people — it’s getting stronger.”Further benefiting the union are the economics of organizing workers versus the economics of persuading workers not to unionize. The costs of seeking an election at another store — like legal filings whose arguments the union’s lawyers have already refined — are relatively modest. Starbucks workers themselves are the boots on the ground.By contrast, if the company were to replicate its Buffalo approach, that could mean bringing in 10 or more out-of-town officials over a period of months. Starbucks has dispatched a few out-of-town officials and area managers to a store in Mesa, Ariz., the only city beyond Buffalo where the labor board has set an election date. The company said that some officials there were addressing operational issues and that others were educating employees about what unionizing would entail, as in Buffalo. Some workers in both cities said they found the presence of these officials intimidating.Len Harris has helped lead a campaign at a Starbucks in the Denver area.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesStarbucks has no shortage of cards to play in resisting unionization. While companies must bargain in good faith with N.L.R.B.-certified unions, they are not required to agree to a contract, and negotiations could drag on for years. The company can also afford to spend large sums to discourage union organizing.But the image-conscious company could eventually decide that risking an anti-union reputation is costlier than a more accommodating posture. “You don’t want to antagonize your customer base,” said Steven M. Swirsky, a management-side lawyer at Epstein Becker & Green. “They have created a brand with certain mystiques around it. You have to be sensitive to how to maintain that, not undermine it.”Starbucks may also conclude that what it spends opposing unions is not money well spent. “When you’re making a resource commitment at some point you have to realize there is a reason this is happening, and it may not be a reason you’re going to be able to fix soon enough to make a difference,” said Brian West Easley, a management-side lawyer at Jones Day.Complicating the challenge is that the workers involved in organizing appear to be less interested in addressing specific problems like staffing and pay — though those are certainly concerns — than in having more input at work. David Pryzbylski, a management-side lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg, said that of over 100 campaigns he has handled, the union typically failed to even qualify for a vote when there was a specific economic issue driving the organizing, but tended to get much further when “employees don’t feel like they have a voice.”Several Starbucks workers said that unionizing was not merely a means to improve their work lives but a goal in itself and that they supported a union as a matter of principle. “One of the main things we want to have a union for is to establish the right to have a union — it’s a little circular,” said Ms. Ybarra, in Seattle. “They’re trying to discourage folks from creating any communal organization.” More

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    Buffalo Starbucks Workers Vote for Union at 1 Store

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    Employees at a Buffalo-area Starbucks store have voted to form a union, making it the only one of the nearly 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States to be organized and notching an important symbolic victory for labor at a time when workers across the country are expressing frustration with wages and working conditions.The result, announced on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board, represents a major challenge to the labor model at the giant coffee retailer, which has argued that its workers enjoy some of the best wages and benefits in the retail and restaurant industry and don’t need a union.The union was leading in an election at another store, but by a margin smaller than the number of ballots the union was seeking to disqualify through challenges. The challenges must be resolved by the labor agency’s regional director in the coming days or weeks before there is a result. Workers at a third store voted against unionizing, according to the board, though a union lawyer contended that some ballots had been delivered to the agency and not counted.“Although it’s a small number of workers, the result has huge symbolic importance and symbols are important when it comes to union organizing,” John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, said in an email. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a considerable amount of risk, and it helps if they can see others who have taken that risk and it has paid off.”The unionized employees, who are joining Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union, received inquiries throughout the campaign from Starbucks workers across the country who said they were paying close attention and were interested in unionizing as well.“I don’t think it will stop in Buffalo, whatsoever,” Alexis Rizzo, a worker at one of the stores and a leader in the organizing campaign, said at a news conference after the vote.Workers cited frustration over understaffing and insufficient training when they filed for union elections at the stores in late August, problems that have dogged the company for years but which appeared to worsen during the pandemic. Such problems are not unique to Starbucks and have been problems for workers across the restaurant and retail industries for many years.“We continue on as we did today, yesterday and the day before that,” Rossann Williams, Starbucks’s president of retail for North America, said in a letter to employees after the vote. “The vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other.”The election occurred through mail ballots that were due Wednesday. In November, workers at three more Buffalo-area stores filed the paperwork needed to hold union elections, but it was unclear when votes would take place for those outlets.Starbucks responded to the union campaign with a sense of urgency. Throughout the fall, out-of-town managers and executives — even Ms. Williams — converged on stores in Buffalo, where they questioned employees about operational challenges and assisted in menial tasks like cleaning bathrooms.In a video of a meeting in September viewed by The New York Times, a district manager from Arizona told co-workers that the company had asked her to go to Buffalo to help “save it” from unionization.Several workers who support the union said they found the presence of these officials intimidating and, at times, surreal. They also complained that Starbucks had temporarily closed certain stores in the area, which they found disruptive, and said Starbucks had excessively added staff in at least one of the three stores that held elections. The workers said this had diluted support for unionization at the store.“As of today we’ve done it in spite of everything that the company has thrown at us and we all know it has been an extensive anti-union campaign by Starbucks corporate,” Michelle Eisen, a barista at the Buffalo location that unionized who also helped lead the campaign, said at the news conference.Former National Labor Relations Board officials have said that these actions by the company could be interpreted as undermining the “laboratory conditions” that are supposed to prevail during union elections and that they could serve as grounds for throwing out a result. Workers involved in the union campaign and a union lawyer indicated that they might challenge the result at the store where workers voted down the union.A regional director of the labor board recently overturned a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama on similar grounds.Starbucks has said that it dispatched out-of-town officials and temporarily closed stores to help solve staffing and training problems and to remodel stores to make them more efficient. The company said that it added staff to deal with an increase in the number of workers calling in sick and that it had taken such steps across the country since the spring, when coronavirus infection rates dropped and stores became busier.Ms. Williams, the North America president, said in an interview on Wednesday from Buffalo that she did not feel that the run-up to the vote had been especially contentious and that she had spent much of her time there this fall listening to employees (partners, in the company’s words) and addressing “the conditions that partners had pointed out.”The key issue at the store whose vote was unresolved, near the Buffalo airport, was whether several workers who cast ballots were actually employed at the store. The union argues that they were employed at another store in the area and worked at the airport store for only a short period of time. The company said they were eligible to vote under the labor board’s rules.The outcome could be important for determining the union’s leverage when it seeks to negotiate a contract. Under the law, an employer is obligated to bargain with a union in good faith, but there is no requirement that it actually agree to a contract, and the consequences of failing to bargain in good faith are limited.“The incentives to resist bargaining are significant for the employer,” said Kate Andrias, a labor law expert at Columbia Law School. “If workers are able to win a good contract, it sets a precedent.”Professor Andrias said that the ability to win a contract in such situations often hinged on the amount of economic pressure the union can exert, and that having a second unionized store could help in this regard.Ms. Eisen, the worker at the store that unionized, said at the news conference that the workers would like to “offer the olive branch to the company and say, ‘Let’s put this behind us.’” She added: “Now is the time, let’s get to the bargaining table as quickly as possible.”Starbucks has faced other union campaigns over the years, including one in New York City in the 2000s and one in 2019 in Philadelphia, where it fired two employees involved in organizing, a move that a labor board judge found unlawful. The company appealed the ruling and a decision is still pending.Neither of those campaigns succeeded, but workers are unionized at Starbucks stores owned by other companies that operate them under licensing agreements. And workers at a company-owned store in Canada recently unionized.A handful of the company’s early stores in Seattle appear to have had a union and were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers in the 1980s. The union was later decertified. More

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    Starbucks Workers at 3 More Buffalo-Area Stores File for Union Elections

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    One day before ballots were scheduled to go out to workers at three Buffalo-area Starbucks in a vote on unionization, workers at three other stores in the area filed petitions with federal regulators on Tuesday requesting elections as well.The coming vote is significant because none of the nearly 9,000 corporate-owned Starbucks stores in the United States are unionized.On Monday, Starbucks filed a motion to stay the mailing of ballots while it appeals a ruling by a regional official of the National Labor Relations Board setting up separate votes at the three locations where workers initially filed for elections. The company wants all of the roughly 20 Buffalo-area stores to vote in a single election, an approach that typically favors employers.The first three stores filed for union elections in late August, and Starbucks dispatched managers and more senior company officials to the area from out of state in the weeks that followed in what it said was an effort to fix operational issues.The union has complained that the out-of-town officials are unlawfully intimidating and surveilling workers and filed an unfair labor practice charge making this accusation last week. The union also contends that Starbucks transferred in or hired a number of additional employees at two of the three stores to dilute union support.The so-called packing of a workplace before a union election is unlawful if bringing in new workers serves no legitimate business purpose and if the employer has reason to believe that the new workers will oppose a union. Starbucks has said the additional workers are needed to deal with staffing shortages.The Starbucks workers who support unionizing are seeking to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The union says there are 31 to 41 eligible employees at each of the three locations filing the new petitions. It is seeking elections at each of them on Nov. 30.Starbucks has maintained that individual stores should not hold separate elections because its employees can work at multiple locations and because it largely manages stores in a single area as a group rather than at a store level.“We believe all of our partners in this Buffalo market deserve the right to vote,” Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said Tuesday. “Today’s announcement that partners in three additional Buffalo stores are filing to vote underscores our position that partners throughout the market should have a voice in this important decision.” More

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    As Starbucks Workers Seek a Union, Company Officials Converge on Stores

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    A push in the Buffalo area could produce the first union at company-owned stores in the U.S. But backers say moves by management are having a chilling effect.BUFFALO — During her decade-plus at Starbucks, Michelle Eisen says she has endured her share of workplace stress. She points to the company’s increased use of productivity goals, inadequate attention to training and periods of understaffing or high turnover.But she had never encountered a change that the company made after workers at her store and two other Buffalo-area locations filed for a union election in late August: two additional “support managers” from out of state, who often work on the floor with the baristas and who, according to Ms. Eisen, have created unease.“For a lot of newer baristas, it’s an imposing force,” Ms. Eisen said. “It is not an easy job. It should not be complicated further by feeling like you’re having everything you’re doing or saying watched and listened to.”Workers and organizers involved in the unionization effort say the imported managers are part of a counteroffensive by the company intended to intimidate workers, disrupt normal operations and undermine support for the union.Starbucks says the additional managers, along with an increase in the number of workers in stores and the arrival of a top corporate executive from out of town, are standard company practices. It says the changes, which also include temporarily shutting down stores in the area, are intended to help improve training and staffing — longstanding issues — and that they are a response not to the union campaign but to input the company solicited from employees.“The listening sessions led to requests from partners that resulted in those actions,” said Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman. “It’s not a decision where our leadership came in and said, ‘We’re going to do this and this.’ We listened, heard their concerns.”None of the nearly 9,000 corporate-owned Starbucks locations in the country are unionized. The prospect that workers there could form a union appears to reflect a recent increase in labor activism nationwide, including strikes across a variety of industries.According to the National Labor Relations Board, union elections are supposed to be conducted under “laboratory conditions,” in which workers can vote in an environment free of intimidation, in an election process that is not controlled by the employer.Former labor board officials say the company’s actions could cause an election to be set aside on these grounds should the union lose.“You could say it’s part of an overall series of events that seems to create a tendency that people would be chilled or inhibited,” said Wilma B. Liebman, a chairwoman of the board during the Obama administration.A labor board official recently recommended that a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama be overturned for similar reasons, but Mr. Borges said Starbucks did not believe anything it had done would warrant overturning an election.Starbucks has faced union campaigns before, including efforts in the early 2000s in New York City and in 2019 in Philadelphia, where the firing of two employees involved in union organizing was deemed unlawful by a labor board judge. Starbucks has appealed the ruling.Though none of the campaigns were successful in this country, a Starbucks-owned store in Canada recently unionized, and some stores owned by other companies that have licensing agreements with Starbucks are unionized.Many of the ways Starbucks has responded in Buffalo — where union backers seek to become part of Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union — are typical of employers. The measures include holding meetings with employees in which company officials question the need for a third party to represent them.Starbucks is also seeking to persuade the labor board to require that workers at all 20 Buffalo-area stores take part in the election, rather than allow stores to vote individually, arguing that employees can spend time at multiple locations. (Union organizers typically favor voting in smaller units to increase the chance of gaining a foothold in at least some locations.) The board is likely to rule on this question and set an election date in the coming weeks.But some of the company’s actions during the union campaign are unorthodox, according to labor law experts. “A huge increase in staffing, shutting down stores, it’s all unusual,” said Matthew Bodie, a law professor at St. Louis University who is a former labor board attorney.Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks worker in Buffalo, said the sudden presence of managers from out of state created unease among many employees.Libby March for The New York TimesA recent visit to a Starbucks near the airport, where workers have filed for a union election, turned up at least nine baristas behind the counter but only a handful of customers.“It’s insane,” said Alexis Rizzo, a longtime Starbucks employee who has been a leader of the organizing campaign at the store. “Even if you’re just trying to run to the back to grab a gallon of milk, you now have to run an obstacle course to fit between all the folks who have no real reason to be there.”Ms. Rizzo said the number of employees in the store at once — which she said had run into the teens — made those who predate the union election filing feel outnumbered and demoralized. “It’s intimidating,” she said. “You go to work and it’s just you and 10 people you don’t know.”Starbucks said the additional personnel were intended to help the store after an uptick in workers who were out sick.Some of the additional employees have come to the airport location from a nearby store that Starbucks recently turned into a training facility. That store does not have an election petition pending, but many of its workers have pledged support for the union effort, and some feel separated and disoriented as well.“Initially, people thought our store could use a little reset,” said Colin Cochran, a pro-union employee at the store that was turned into a training facility, who has mostly been assigned to other locations since then. “As it’s dragged out and we’re getting sent to more and more other stores, it’s been frustrating. We want to see each other again.”Workers said their anxiety had been heightened by the sudden appearance of new managers and company officials from out of town.In a video of a meeting in September, a district manager in Arizona tells co-workers that the company has asked her to spend time in Buffalo over the next 90 days. “There’s a huge task force out there that’s trying to fix the problem because if Buffalo, N.Y., gets unionized, it will be the first market in Starbucks history,” the district manager says in the video, provided by a person at the meeting and viewed by The New York Times. When someone asks if the task force is a “last-ditch effort to try and stop it,” the district manager responds, “Yeah, we’re going to save it.”Will Westlake, a barista in a Buffalo suburb called Hamburg, where workers have also filed for a union election, said a store log showed that several company officials from outside the Buffalo area had been to the store during the past six weeks. Included were at least seven visits from Rossann Williams, Starbucks’ president of retail for North America.The officials sometimes work on laptops facing the baristas, sometimes join them behind the bar to work and inquire about the store, and sometimes perform menial tasks like cleaning the bathroom, Mr. Westlake said. He said that many of his co-workers felt intimidated by these officials and that he found the presence of Ms. Williams “surreal.”Starbucks said that many of the officials were regional leaders and coaches who were helping to solve operational issues and remodel stores, and that they were part of a companywide effort dating to May, when Covid-19 infection rates declined and stores across the country got busier.“The resurgence of business came so fast we were not prepared,” Ms. Williams said in an interview.Colin Cochran was among the pro-union workers at the Starbucks store that was turned into a training facility.Libby March for The New York TimesThe company says that it has added staffing in a number of cities beyond Buffalo, especially in the Midwest and the Mountain West, and that it brought on an additional recruiter in each of its 12 regions in the spring to expedite hiring. It said it had turned about 40 stores around the country into temporary training facilities.On a Saturday in October, Ms. Williams visited the training store, saying little as she stood behind a group of workers while a trainer instructed them at the bar.Later, seated outside the store to discuss her work in Buffalo, she waved off the idea that temporarily shutting down a store or making other significant changes might compromise the union election’s laboratory conditions.“If I went to a market and saw the condition some of these stores are in, and I didn’t do anything about it, it would be so against my job,” she said. “There’s no way I could come here and say I’m not going to do anything.” More

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    Retailers Rethink Pandemic-Battered Manhattan

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    Starbucks has closed more than 40 stores, while adding mobile-order pickup counters in others. Other chains like Sonic are taking advantage of vacancies to establish themselves in New York.In the heart of Manhattan’s garment district, a once-busy Starbucks on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 39th Street sits empty. Just down the block, a Dos Toros Taqueria that opened just three years ago is now closed. And Wok to Walk, which once served steaming containers of noodles mixed with chicken and vegetables to a bustling lunch crowd, is also shuttered.While the Delta variant of the coronavirus has again delayed plans by many companies to bring employees back to offices en masse, workers who have been trickling into Midtown are discovering that many of their favorite haunts for a quick cup of coffee and a muffin in the morning or sandwich or salad at lunchtime have disappeared. A number of those that are open are operating at reduced hours or with limited menus.With the pandemic keeping millions of New York City office employees home for the past year, restaurants, coffee shops, apparel retailers and others struggled to stay afloat.By the end of 2020, the number of chain stores in Manhattan — everything from drugstores to clothing retailers to restaurants — had fallen by more than 17 percent from 2019, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research and policy organization.Across Manhattan, the number of available ground-floor stores, normally the domain of busy restaurants and clothing stores, has soared. A quarter of the ground-floor storefronts in Lower Manhattan are available for rent, while about a third are available in Herald Square, according to a report by the real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.Starbucks has permanently closed 44 of its 235 locations in Manhattan. It is now adding pickup areas in many stores.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesStarbucks has permanently closed 44 outlets in Manhattan since March of last year. Pret a Manger has reopened only half of the 60 locations it had in New York City before the pandemic. Numerous delicatessens, independent restaurants and smaller local chains have gone dark.“Midtown clearly has been the hardest hit of any of the areas of Manhattan,” said Jeffrey Roseman, a veteran retail real-estate broker with Newmark. “If you think of other office-centric areas, whether all the way downtown or Flatiron or Hudson Yards, there is a lot of residential surrounding those areas that helped sustain those markets. Midtown, for the most part, is a one-trick pony.“It’s mostly offices and hotels, which also took a hit from the downturn in tourism.”The turmoil has reached farther downtown though. Last week, the luxury furniture retailer ABC Carpet & Home — whose flagship store was a fixture of the Union Square area — filed for bankruptcy protection, in part because of “a mass exodus of current and prospective customers leaving the city.”But in a city where one person’s downturn is someone else’s opportunity, some restaurant chains are taking advantage of the record-low retail rents to set up shop or expand their presence in New York City.In the second quarter, food and beverage companies signed 23 new leases in Manhattan, leading apparel retailers, which signed 10 new leases, according to the commercial real estate services firm CBRE.Shake Shack and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen were among those signing new rental agreements this year. So was the burger chain Sonic, which signed a lease for its first New York City outpost, replacing a Pax Wholesome Foods location in Midtown. The Philippines-based chicken joint Jollibee, which enjoys a committed following, plans to open a massive flagship restaurant in Times Square.Sonic signed a lease for its first New York City outpost, replacing a Pax Wholesome Foods in Midtown.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesStill, with so much uncertainty about when employees may fully return to Midtown offices, some companies are proceeding carefully. The coffee shop Bluestone Lane had plans to expand aggressively into Manhattan before the pandemic and is still considering locations in Midtown. But it has now turned its focus to opening in more residential neighborhoods like Battery Park City, Hudson Yards and Tribeca.“We intentionally selected urban residential areas for our new cafes so we are not dependent on our locals returning to a physical office space, and are well-positioned for the future of hybrid work,” Nick Stone, the founder and chief executive of Bluestone Lane, said in an emailed statement.And some chain restaurants that already have reopened in Midtown are altering their strategies to address what they believe are the changing needs of customers in a post-Covid world.On a recent weekday, a handful of customers were nibbling on salads and sandwiches at the Bryant Park location of Le Pain Quotidien. The long, communal tables that once dominated the front of the restaurant are gone for now, while refrigerated cases for a selection of grab-and-go drinks, salads and sandwiches will be expanded next year as part of a remodeling. A new app to preorder and pick up food became available in May.While the new technologies work for some customers, others long for the past.A Europa Cafe in Times Square closed, one of numerous stores to shutter during the pandemic.Hilary Swift for The New York Times“We used QR codes for guests to look at the menu as we tried to limit the contact of surfaces, but the majority of our guests want to hold a real menu,” said Stephen Smittle, the senior vice president of operations for Le Pain Quotidien. “They very much want to feel normal. They want a server. They want to hold a cup of coffee, not a paper cup.”Struggling before the pandemic, Le Pain Quotidien filed for bankruptcy in May 2020. It was acquired by Aurify Brands, which has since reopened many of the Le Pain Quotidien locations around the city, including several in Midtown.“Our thinking is that Midtown New York will come back to a level that might not be 100 percent prepandemic, but based upon information we have gathered, I do believe that Midtown is going to come back to a prominent level,” Mr. Smittle said.An online-order status board at Starbucks.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesCustomers increasingly like ordering drinks online and then picking up at the store.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFor Starbucks, one of the big lessons from the pandemic was that customers liked ordering their drinks online and then quickly picking them up at stores or drive-throughs. Starbucks had started to offer that even before the pandemic, opening a pickup location in Midtown’s Pennsylvania Plaza in late 2019.Since early 2020, Starbucks has permanently closed 44 of its 235 locations in Manhattan. But it is in the process of adding mobile pickup areas in many stores and adding more pickup-only locations. The company says that it expects to have net new store growth in Manhattan in the next few years.Before the pandemic, Starbucks operated three stores around the Columbus Circle area. It closed them and this year, opened one large restaurant. Now runners from Central Park pick up their preordered drinks from a mobile counter and head out again, while other customers stand in line to place their orders and can sit at nearby tables.“We were going to build the concept out and evolve over time,” said John Culver, the president of North America and chief operating officer for Starbucks. “What we’ve done is taken the opportunity that the pandemic has presented and accelerated the transformation of our portfolio of stores. Consumer behaviors during the pandemic have accelerated at levels that no one expected.” More