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Malden mayor, dramatically, announces city’s first-ever Starbucks
"We've always been a Dunkin' Donuts town."
Starbucks has more than 6,000 stores across the United States, but zero are located in Malden.
That’s about to change.
With a crescendoing video posted on Twitter later Monday afternoon, Malden Mayor Gary Christenson unveiled the unprecedented: for the first time, a Starbucks is opening in the changing, 60,000-person Boston suburb.
“We’ve always been a Dunkin’ Donuts town,” Kevin Duffy, the head of strategy and business development for Malden, told Boston.com.
According to Duffy, the city’s inaugural Starbucks is scheduled to open this fall “definitely by Thanksgiving,” if not October, in Malden Center on the corner of Exchange and Commercial streets.
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The coffee shop is taking the “key corner” — “literally right across” from the Malden Center MBTA station — of a recently renovated, four-story building that includes restaurants and future lab space, Duffy said.
“I think they just recognized all the changes Malden has gone through,” he said.
To note: Duffy says that Malden’s residential neighborhoods “are still the classical neighborhoods that do have the mom-and-pop coffee shops.” But also he contends that Starbucks’s decision to move in is an indication that the international coffee chain has taken note of the city’s transit-oriented development strategy around the denser downtown area, with everything from luxury apartment buildings to Swedish questing outposts.
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“Malden is the urban-suburban continental divide,” Duffy said. “It’s just become such a hot spot that people like Starbucks are saying we have to get in.”
Of course, old habits die hard. So rest assured Maldonians, there’s still a Dunkin’ just a block up the street.
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