I recently wrote about the recent spate of Starbucks closures. The original chart used in the blog post was produced using R, but I later discovered Swivel and the first data set I uploaded was this Starbucks data. Here is an edited extract of the blog post.

On 1 July 2008, Starbucks announced the closure of around 600 outlets in the US. More drastically, on 29 July they then announced that 61 of the 84 Australian outlets would be closing.

Although the US closures represent a far smaller proportion of total outlets than here in Australia, they still represent a striking turnaround in the previously relentless growth of the coffee giant. Could this presage a significant change in the fortunes of one of the darlings of the MBA set? Or is it simply the evolution from growth to maturity?

I have to thank Mike for the data in this chart, which was painstakingly extracted from the Starbucks company timeline. The 2008 figure takes into account the 616 US closures (exact figure taken from the full list of closures) and the 61 Australian closures. I should note that any new store openings in 2008 are not accounted for.