The Starbucks at 999 Third Ave. is gone. The company closed the ground-floor location inside DocuSign Tower on Friday, Aug. 7, one more storefront dark in a financial district where worker presence has dropped to barely 60% of 2019 levels.

The closure is tied directly to DocuSign's decision to leave the building. The San Francisco-based e-signature company confirmed in early June that it will vacate 999 Third Ave. by summer 2027, moving to a 115,000-square-foot lease at the JPMorganChase Center at 1301 Second Ave., the Seattle Times reported. DocuSign's departure will push the tower to 56% vacancy, a blow to owner Blackstone, which paid $389 million for the building in 2013. King County now values it at roughly $225 million, down from a peak of $533 million in 2020.

A Starbucks spokesperson told the Seattle Times that several factors, including DocuSign's planned departure, drove the decision not to renew the lease. The company did not say how many workers were displaced at the location.

The 999 Third Ave. store is the latest in a wave. Starbucks has closed hundreds of locations over the past year under its "Back to Starbucks" strategy, including Seattle spots at First Hill, the University District, the Seattle Center Armory, Seattle Children's hospital and the Metropolitan Park East building downtown. In September 2025, the company announced 900 layoffs and at least 28 Washington state store closures. In March 2026, five more Seattle locations shut, displacing 69 workers.

The pattern tracks with a broader downtown crisis. Nearly 37% of Seattle's downtown office space sits vacant, the highest rate of any major U.S. downtown, according to real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Since 2020, downtown office properties have shed $15 billion in value and generate $128 million less in annual property taxes, according to the Seattle Times.

"We don't need more business taxes in Seattle. We need more businesses located here paying taxes," Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes said in a July Fox 13 interview.

For the ground-floor retail ecosystem along Third and Fourth Avenues, each anchor tenant departure removes a layer of daily customers. A coffee shop inside a 95%-occupied tower, as 999 Third Ave. was in 2015, operates in a fundamentally different economy than one inside a building headed toward majority vacancy.

Not every former Starbucks space stays dark. In Ballard, a French bakery called Petit Pierre took over a shuttered Starbucks location in July, and Dutch Bros. Coffee was eyeing its first Seattle store in another former Starbucks space, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. No new tenant has been announced for the 999 Third Ave. storefront.

Mayor Katie Wilson will release her budget proposal in September, with new revenue options including a local capital gains tax and payroll tax expansion on the table to address a nearly half-billion-dollar shortfall over three years. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Aug. 7, accused Wilson of "socialist rhetoric" that "vilifies employers."

DocuSign's lease at 999 Third Ave. runs through next summer. Blackstone has not announced plans for the building's empty floors or the ground-floor retail space below them.