The Ansley Mall Starbucks will close this weekend, just three years after unionizing. The location was the second to unionize in the Atlanta area in June 2022.
The Ansley Mall location’s lease ends this month, and its official last day is June 8. A Starbucks spokesperson told Atlanta Civic Circle that the company is collaborating with Workers United to transfer the location’s 12 employees to other stores.
“We deeply appreciate the opportunity we’ve had to build and share connections with the members of this community over the last several years,” Starbucks spokesperson Phil Gee wrote to ACC in an email.
Former Ansley Mall Starbucks shift supervisor Amanda Rivera, who now works for Workers United on the Starbucks campaign, believes that the company is closing its Ansley Mall location in retaliation for union activity, which would be illegal. Because Ansley Mall is a popular location close to the Beltline, she doesn’t see a reason to close the store there. ACC asked a Starbucks spokesperson why the company is choosing to close that location, but they did not directly respond to that question.
“This store has been a very strong and passionate union store,” Rivera said. “A lot of the workers that work in this store have been here since the beginning, for the past three years, and they care about each other, they care about the conditions they work under, and they care about the community.”
Ansley Mall baristas Shabeen Khetani and Elexis Bernavil agreed, with Khetani pointing to the store’s deep roots in the community. The Ansley Mall location has been open for decades.
Starbucks announced the store’s June closure in May. Both Khetani and Bernavil say that the short notice was disruptive to employees’ lives. Being transferred will also change their commutes, which Khetani said will add stress to employees who are dealing with financial difficulties. “A lot of my coworkers, specifically at my store, they have no reliable transportation, so they have to rely on public transit,” Khetani explained.
Workers at Ansley Mall unionized due to a variety of issues, employees said, including a lack of communication between the company and its workers about things like increased wages and safety. “Everything was kind of shrouded in mystery, and the company was making decisions without asking us what would help,” Rivera, the Workers United staffer, said.
Khetani, who worked for four years at Ansley Mall, said unionizing helped resolve some of the issues workers faced. “We were able to hold our previous managers accountable,” Khetani said. “And we were able to get our broken equipment fixed.”
SBWU workers have held several strikes and protests at Ansley Mall in the three years since unionization. Workers had concerns about management, communication from corporate, and Starbucks’s new dress code, which Rivera said was not negotiated with workers before the company introduced it. Khetani said complying with the dress code required her to buy new work clothes, which she could not immediately afford.
Bernavil transferred to Ansley Mall in January 2025 because she wanted to work at a unionized store. She described that location as a welcoming, inclusive place, especially for queer and neurodivergent people, and she’s sad to see it close.
Rivera believes the Ansley Mall employees will continue advocating for workers’ rights wherever they go, though. “The workers are all going to other stores, so their knowledge and their experience is not gone,” Rivera said. “The physical location, sure, it’s gone, but Starbucks Workers United Ansley Mall is something that they carry with them, and they can build at their new store.”
Ansley Mall employees agreed, saying they feel hopeful about the future of the union. Khetani will transfer to a location on Howell Mill Road and hopes to revitalize the union there, which she said has declined in strength since it started in 2022.
Currently, there are nine other unionized Starbucks locations in the Atlanta area. “The company doesn’t realize that when you send all these union members out to other stores that they are likely going to unionize those stores,” Khetani said. “If they shut down Ansley, two or three other stores in Atlanta are going to unionize.”
