Last Call on Niagara Falls Boulevard and McKinley Parkway

If your morning has a green cup in it, you'll want to know this one. Two Western New York Starbucks are closing their doors. The store at 1703 Niagara Falls Boulevard in Amherst and the one at 3540 McKinley Parkway in Blasdell, over in the Town of Hamburg, are both scheduled to shut down on Saturday, September 26, the company has confirmed.

For the regulars who've built a little piece of their day around either spot, the barista who starts your order before you reach the counter, the corner table where you answer emails, that's a real loss. And it's part of something a lot bigger than two Buffalo-area storefronts.

Part of a Much Bigger Cutback

These two aren't closing on their own. They're among roughly 250 underperforming Starbucks locations across North America that the company is shutting down in its second major round of closures. It's all part of a turnaround plan under CEO Brian Niccol, who's trying to steady a company that's stumbled in recent years. In a round about a year earlier, Starbucks closed 627 stores across North America and Europe. Even after all of it, the company still runs more than 18,000 company-operated and licensed stores across the United States, so this is a trim, not a collapse. Still, when it's your store, the national numbers don't mean much.

What Happens to the People Behind the Counter

The part that matters most around here isn't the corporate math. It's the folks in the green aprons. Starbucks has said that employees affected by the closures will be offered transfers to other locations when that's possible. For workers who can't be moved to another store, the company said it would provide severance. It's a small comfort for people who've spent early mornings and late nights learning a few hundred regulars' orders by heart, but at least it's something.

The Twist Only Buffalo Can Claim

Here's the part that makes this a Buffalo story and not just a business headline. The entire national movement to unionize Starbucks started right here. In December 2021, a Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo became the first company-owned store in the country to vote to unionize. What began on that one Buffalo street corner spread across the map. By June 2026, more than 15,000 workers at over 700 Starbucks stores had voted to organize with Starbucks Workers United, a union that was founded in 2021 right here in Buffalo.

There's a wrinkle worth naming. Neither the Amherst store nor the Blasdell store was part of that union, and the company and the union still haven't reached a national labor agreement despite bargaining that's been going on since 2024. So the two stores closing here aren't union shops. But they're closing in the very city that lit the fuse on the whole fight, and that's the kind of footnote only Western New York gets to own.

More Than a Place To Buy Coffee

Whatever you think of a giant coffee chain, a neighborhood store becomes a neighborhood thing. It's where a first date got less awkward over two lattes, where a nervous student parked for a whole semester of studying, where a retiree found somewhere warm to read the paper on a gray Boulevard morning. When one closes, a little piece of a daily routine goes with it. That's true whether the sign out front says a local name or a national one.

What Comes Next

The good news is that Western New York is not exactly short on coffee. Plenty of other Starbucks locations across the region are staying open, and the area's independent shops, the ones with the hand-lettered menus and the owner working the espresso machine, are always glad to meet a displaced regular. If you've lost your spot, this might be the nudge to go find a new favorite a few blocks over.

Buffalo has always been a town that adapts, that finds the next corner table and the next familiar face. Two stores are going quiet. The coffee, and the neighborly habit of gathering over it, isn't going anywhere.