A Starbucks opening in Center City could be the state’s largest
The store, slated for 111 S. 11th St., will be accessible from the street as well as an entrance within Jefferson's Gibbon Building.
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A new Starbucks set to open in Center City this year would be the company’s largest location in Pennsylvania, according to John Betz, the licensee of the location, who is working with his wife and another business partner on the project.
The coffee shop will be about 4,200 square feet — similar to the size of a high school basketball court. The store is expected to open at 111 S. 11th St. by November or December.
The store will be in Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s Gibbon Building, which is near the medical provider’s new 19-story outpatient building. Starbucks is taking over a space that has been occupied by a bank for years. Most recently a TD Bank closed there in 2021, Betz said.
The site still needs to secure a zoning adjustment from the city because of the amount of seating proposed, but once open, the Starbucks will have an entrance accessible from the street, and another one within the hospital. The plan includes having a “community table” that could be booked by customers for meetings and seating for 42 people in total. Store hours are expected to be from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The store will employ around 25 to 30 workers expected to be a combination of full-time and part-time staff, he said. The starting wage will be around $17 an hour.
“One of the honors of our lives … is to be there for those hospital associates, the nurses, the doctors, the administrators and be that little glimpse of normalcy, that bright spot. We take that responsibility to heart,” said Betz, who is a licensee of other Starbucks locations within hospitals in New Jersey.
The location in Center City will be just one block away from a Starbucks that closed at 10th and Chestnut Streets in 2022. That closure was part of over a dozen sites the company announced it would shutter mainly on the West Coast that year. In 2022, Starbucks also announced the opening of a new store at 1709 Chestnut that would be focused on take-out orders.
Starbucks and other Center City businesses had experienced issues with drug use in their bathrooms, Paul Levy, then president of the Center City District, told the Inquirer in 2022.
The new location at Jefferson will have surveillance cameras both within and outside the store, Betz said. A security guard from the hospital’s team will also be assigned to the site.
Beyond the location in Center City, Betz is exploring opening two more Starbucks sites with Jefferson, potentially in Washington Township and in Abington. No leases have been signed.
A spokesperson for Starbucks confirmed the new store is slated to open this year but did not confirm whether it will be the largest in Pennsylvania.
The news of the store opening in Philadelphia comes as workers across Starbucks locations have been unionizing in recent years. Over 470 Starbucks locations have unionized since 2021, and as of April, the union was in the midst of negotiating contracts with the company. The Philadelphia area has 13 unionized Starbucks locations, including one at 16th and Walnut Streets, which joined the union in July.