As the magnitude of Starbucks’ ambitions in Nashville comes into focus, reaction in the global coffee giant's home base of Seattle is also sharpening.

On Tuesday, Starbucks said that its new Nashville office will grow to up to 2,000 workers over the next five years. With that headcount, Nashville's workforce would be more than half as big as the workforce currently at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood.

The new jobs come with an average salary of $125,000, and 1,200 of the positions will be in IT roles, Nashville officials said at a press conference Tuesday.

Starbucks has also committed to investing $100 million in Tennessee.

Despite the potential size of the Nashville office, Starbucks insisted on Tuesday, as it has since it announced the new office in early March, that it’s not leaving Seattle.

Some Seattle positions are moving to Nashville, but many of the 2,000 employees there will be new hires for Starbucks' planned retail expansion in the Southeast.

Nashville “will be a complement to our global and North America headquarters in Seattle where we will maintain a large presence,” Sara Kelly, Starbucks’ head of human resources, posted Tuesday on the company's news blog.

It’s unclear how many Seattle jobs will move to Nashville, how many Seattle employees will be invited to relocate, or what kind of relocation incentives have been offered.

The company has declined to comment beyond what its executives have said in internal communications or a press conference Tuesday in Nashville.

As new details of the Nashville plan spread Tuesday, however, reaction in Seattle ran the gamut.

Some Starbucks employees said the sheer size of the Nashville operation underscores the Seattle company’s weakening ties to the city where it was founded 55 years ago.

“When the company says Seattle is still the headquarters, people are just rolling their eyes,” said a senior Starbucks executive at Sodo, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their employment.

Since Tuesday morning, the executive added, “everyone is just completely resigned to the idea that this company is moving to Tennessee.”

By contrast, some Seattle residents saw the Nashville move as part of a broader trend among employers favoring places like Tennessee, which boasts low taxes and pro-business incentives.

A former Starbucks employee, Heather Ring, said Tuesday “the news that they were going to Nashville felt sad at first – like they were leaving their roots here in their hometown.”

Ring, who lives on Mercer Island, started working as a barista in 1992 and rose through the ranks to build her sales and marketing career until her departure in 2009.

She still holds company stocks and sees many upsides to an outpost in Tennessee, including cost savings, a friendly business environment and a diversified talent pool.

What's next

The scale of Starbucks’ Nashville move is stoking a broader concern among business leaders that rising taxes and anti-business sentiments in Washington and Seattle are tempting more employers to consider relocations.

In December, Starbucks briefly considered leasing most of a 21-story Bellevue office tower large enough, in theory, for much of the Sodo staff, according to a former Starbucks executive and nearly a dozen Seattle-area real estate and civic leaders with direct or indirect knowledge of lease discussions.

And, as many in the business community were quick to note, those Bellevue lease rumors surfaced soon after Seattle Mayor-elect Katie Wilson urged Seattleites to boycott Starbucks at a Nov. 13 union rally.

City leaders must ... commit to a more competitive and welcoming approach to further economic opportunity and prosperity," Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, a nonprofit organization advocating for downtown, said in a statement Tuesday.

"Over the last three years, Seattle has shed thousands of jobs while other cities in the region and across the country experience job growth," said Scholes.

Starbucks, which has tended to stay out of the public debate over taxes, declined to comment on the Bellevue lease.

It has cast Nashville as part of a carefully orchestrated turnaround strategy under Brian Niccol, who was hired in late 2024 to help Starbucks revive lagging sales and profits.

That plan, dubbed “Back to Starbucks,” calls for heavy investment in retail operations, including hiring more staff, some store renovations and a simplified menu to cut customer wait times.

Starbucks Workers United, the union representing thousands of baristas, declined to comment on the Nashville news.

Niccol also wants to add thousands of new stores, including in the South and the Northeast, where Starbucks isn’t so prevalent, and sees Nashville as a second headquarters for that expansion.

“Customer demand is growing in this part of the country, and there's a real opportunity for Starbucks to build more stores, build more opportunities and continue to see us grow our footprint,” Niccol said Tuesday during a press conference in Nashville near Peabody Union, the six-story office tower where Starbucks has leased 250,000 square feet.

'Strong business climate'

Niccol and other Starbucks executives have referenced Tennessee’s other advantages that might be seen as drawing a contrast with Washington and Seattle.

On Tuesday, Niccol praised the way Tennessee and Nashville officials “have created a really strong business climate.”

That may have been a reference to Tennessee’s generally low business taxes and its lack of personal income tax, as well as its aggressive use of tax cuts and other incentives to attract out-of-state employers.

State officials haven’t yet disclosed how much Starbucks will receive in tax breaks or other financial inducements.

But as an example of the kind of incentives on offer, Tennessee’s Super Job Tax Credit program will give a $5,000 per employee annual tax credit for employers that commit to “establish or expand a regional, national or international headquarters” or make an investment of at least $100 million and create at least 100 jobs paying the state’s average occupational wage or higher.

Starbucks' planned investment in Tennessee appears to check off all of boxes.

At the same time, by moving some of its teams to Nashville, Starbucks looks to avoid many millions of dollars under a recently enacted 6.5% Washington state tax on IT services, though that tax is scheduled to expire in 2029.

In addition, both Niccol and Kelly emphasized the importance of Nashville’s skilled labor pool, particularly for IT talent.

As part of the company’s turnaround, Starbucks is restructuring its technology organization, and moving some of its technology teams to Nashville. On Tuesday, IT layoffs were announced internally, although Starbucks declined to specify the scale of the job cuts and whether they will hit workers in Seattle.

Nashville-based job postings at Starbucks include several positions in supply chain management and human resources with potential for six-figure salaries, as of Tuesday.

Those high earnings can stretch far in Tennessee. The cost of living is an estimated 47% lower in Nashville compared to Seattle, according to Forbes.

At Tuesday's press conference, Freddie O'Connell, mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, highlighted local and state efforts to build up Nashville's labor market, especially in high-paying tech jobs.

He said Nashville's "open for business" climate and emerging status as a "premier tech destination" as reasons Starbucks chose the city for its "first major corporate expansion outside of its home base in Seattle.

The focus on talent is likely to add to questions about Starbucks’ future in Seattle.

At his last job, as CEO of Chipotle, Niccol moved that company’s headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach, Calif., where he lived and where Starbucks initially let him work remotely, with fly-ins to Seattle on a company jet.

Niccol said soon after taking the Starbucks job that he wasn’t planning a similar move for the company’s Seattle headquarters.

Starbucks has said repeatedly that it has no plans to leave its Sodo headquarters, where it has been since the 1990s, and which in any case is under lease through 2038.

But Niccol has since expressed frustration with Starbucks’ headquarters staff. Some longtime employees have said they think he might see moving some or all of the company’s operations to Nashville as a way to shake up the its corporate culture.

While some employees understand how that shakeup might help drive a turnaround, they're not sure they can survive the process.

That's a concern for one remote supply chain employee in the West Coast region who called the Nashville announcement a “complete surprise.” They spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of job loss.

They feel like they cannot develop professionally at the company unless they move to Seattle, Toronto or Nashville — and it's not a possibility for them to relocate.

“As a remote Starbucks partner, it has been made very clear to us that our days are limited, more or less,” the employee said.

“That leaves me in a position where I feel lucky to have a paycheck and a job right now, but I am actively looking for other opportunities where I can grow my career.”

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