I have been getting the same text message from about six different people. It is a picture of a closed Starbucks with four words under it: go woke, go broke.

Now, I enjoy a good bumper sticker as much as the next fellow. But I was raised to check the numbers before I repeat something, so I went and checked.

Here is what Starbucks told the government and its own employees on September 24. It is closing about 250 stores in North America. That is roughly 1 percent of the 18,000 or so it runs here. The company expects to eat around $300 million doing it, most of that for getting out of leases and paying the people who lose their jobs.

Here is the part that does not fit on the bumper sticker. Back in July, the same company raised its sales and profit forecast after its fourth straight quarter of growing sales. A business that is going broke does not do that.

So what is going on? The chief operating officer, a man named Mike Grams, wrote to employees that these particular stores either do not make enough money or cannot give customers the experience the company wants. Starbucks has been remodeling stores by the hundreds, about 1,500 by the end of September, and he said the remodels gave them a clearer look at which locations were pulling their weight.

In plain English: somebody finally ran the numbers store by store, and 250 of them came up short.

This is the second time in a year. Last September the company closed 627 stores across North America and Europe and let go of 900 office workers. It has trimmed its plan for new stores too, from 600 or more net openings this year down to about 440.

I do not have a quarrel with a company closing a store that loses money. That is how business works, and I would rather they close it than ask Washington for help keeping it open.

My quarrel is with what they will not say. Starbucks has not told anybody which stores are on the list. It has not said how many are in the United States. And it has not said how many are union shops. More than 700 of its American stores have voted to unionize since late 2021, and there is still no contract. If the list of 250 turns out to lean heavy toward the stores that voted yes, that is a different story than the one in the letter, and folks deserve to know it.

The company says workers will be moved to nearby stores where it can manage it, and the rest will get severance. I hope that is how it goes. A barista in a strip mall did not sign the lease and did not pick the location.

So no, I will not be forwarding the text message. The truth here is more boring and more useful. A big company overbuilt, a boss hired in 2024 is cleaning it up, and the people at the bottom are finding out last.

If you want to be mad about something, be mad that they found out last.