I regularly stop by a drive thru Starbucks while doing errands. It is usually very busy, rarely slow, so, doing good business.
They reduced the hours substantially just after Christmas. Now yesterday and today they were closed, with a note on the door. The note today had changed from yesterday's and said they will be closed tomorrow as well, then open very limited hours on Thursday.
There were a couple young women present when I drove by, hauling trash out of the building and looking very tired and harried. I had never seen them before so I presume they had come from another location to help out. The store was closed at 1 pm but it looked like they were cleaning up a mess left by a crew that had left abruptly the last time it was open.
Very odd and kind of eerie. I know, I know, it's just a coffee shop. But I have seen a lot of weird things happen over the years, the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 crash, so on and so forth. I even remember how my parents dealt with that big recession in the early 90s. And this is bizarre. Are the staff quitting? Are they all down with coof, or booster side effects? Did they walk out en masse and leave a mess? Or have medical emergencies?
I've been watching everything very carefully over the last 2 years and just have a bad, bad feeling.