Almost a week after Bunnell’s Donut Hut in Albert Lea announced it would close its doors July 3, another local coffee shop has announced it is shutting its doors, too.

By the end of the month, Albert Lea’s Starbucks store will be no longer.

Robert Hoffman, former manager of the Albert Lea Starbucks, said he received about a half dozen calls Wednesday from some of his former employees who told him the news.

The building has been opened since September of 2004.

The announcement to close the store came as Starbucks Corp. announced last Tuesday it would close 600 company-operated stores in the next year as a result of the faltering U.S. economy. This is equivalent to 19 percent of all U.S. company-operated stores that opened in the last two years, Chief Financial Officer Pete Bocian said during a conference call last week.

At that time, Seattle-based Starbucks did not say which stores will be closed, only that they are spread throughout the country. The company said 70 percent of those slated for closure had opened after the start of 2006.

Albert Lea’s store is in the opposite 30 percent.

Starbucks spokeswoman Valerie O’Neil said about 12,000 workers, or 7 percent of Starbucks’ global workforce, will be affected by the company closings, which are expected to take place between late July and the middle of 2009.

The company had previously planned to shut 100 stores, but the 500 more that will be closed had been on an internal watch list for some time. They were not profitable, not expected to be profitable in the foreseeable future, and the “vast majority” had been opened near an existing company-operated Starbucks, Bocian said.

Media personnel at Starbucks did not return a phone call made by the Tribune regarding the specifics about the Albert Lea store.

Some analysts had wondered whether Starbucks’ explosive growth in the United States would come back to haunt it as the market became saturated.

But before last Tuesday, the company avoided acknowledging that saturation was an issue and pinned weak financial results and adjustments to new store openings on the economy.

Hoffman said since he found out that the Donut Hut and Starbucks were closing, he’s been out contacting business people who could potentially develop there.

“It’s been needed — but maybe on a smaller scale than what a Starbucks is,” he said. “The Starbucks business model is just awfully expensive.”

Hoffman said he thinks the building would provide a great opportunity for another potential coffee place. If not, then there needs to be another one in the downtown area.

“We’ve found ourselves in a need for coffee,” he said. “And it’s beyond the coffee, it’s the conversations and a place to meet and talk.”

At the end of March, there were 16,226 Starbucks stores around the world. The company operates 7,257 of those stores in the U.S. and 1,867 abroad; the remaining 7,102 locations are run by partners who license the Starbucks brand.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.