A MAJOR coffee chain with 2,000 UK branches is set to close a city centre site this month.
The popular chain has already shut the doors to dozens of its sites over this year.
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Now, the Costa Coffee on Inglis Street in Inverness, Scotland, will close its doors for the final time on July 24.
The branch in the city centre is a popular haunt for residents and tourists.
Costa has said all staff working at the shop will be deployed to other branches.
In April, an announcement was made that the branch would be closing sometime later this year.
The coffee giant operates several shops around the city, including one just a three-minute walk from the Inglis Street branch within the Eastgate Centre.
There are also Costa outlets at the Inverness Retail Park, Inshes Retail Park and the train station.
A Costa Coffee spokesperson said: “We can confirm that our Costa Coffee store on Inglis Street in Inverness is due to close for trade on the 24th of July.
“Customers can still enjoy their favourite Costa coffee at the nearest Costa Coffee store found in Eastgate Shopping Centre.”
Fans of the store were distraught by the loss of the shop.
One wrote: “So sad there is nothing in the town now.”
Another said: “Gutted, it’s the preferred choice out of that and eastgate.”
A third mentioned how much they “loved the place”.
“There’s not enough coffee shops in the town centre as it is, what’s everyone going to do ? Make coffee using a kettle?” a fourth added.
But it’s not all bad news for the coffee chain as it recently announced plans to open a string of branches as well.
In February, it said it would open 11 Costa sites in Sainsbury’s supermarkets across the year.
Sainsbury’s locations in Bristol, London and Surrey will all be serving up lattes and cappuccinos in the coming months.
The move builds on the coffee chain’s ongoing partnership with the supermarket giant with more than 1,000 Costa Express machines in its stores and petrol stations.
Costa isn’t the only coffee chain to close sites in recent months.
Caffè Nero, which launched in the UK in 1997, pulled down the shutters on half a dozen sites in 2023 in a blow for caffeine lovers.
However, one of the six sites was shut for temporary renovation while another was a relocation.
Four coffee houses did close their stores for good though, including its Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, branch which shut on June 3.
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
Its site in Witney closed two days later, then the branch in Wigan’s town centre on June 25.
International coffee giant Starbucks is pulling down the shutters on one of its coffee houses in just a few days.
The chain will be closing its branch in Dalton Park Shopping Centre, County Durham on March 10.
At the end of last year, Starbucks shuttered their coffee house in Botanic Avenue, Belfast, for good.