Luckin Coffee, China-based powerhouse and Starbucks challenger, opening an outpost on Broadway and 8th Street

Luckin Coffee, a Beijing-based coffee brand with 22,000 locations worldwide, is opening an outpost on Eighth Street and Broadway. (Thanks to the EVG reader for the photo and tip!) 

According to Forbes, the brand "opened an extraordinary 6,066 net new stores in China last year to reach 22,284 outlets, 65% of which are company operated. Luckin also opened 21 net new stores in Singapore to reach 51 locations and launched in Hong Kong with five outlets, while it opened its first store in Malaysia in January." 

In the United States, they're here to take on Starbucks, according to The Financial Times, with drinks initially priced at $2 to $3, in "cities with larger Chinese student and tourist populations, to gain a foothold." 

Luckin was founded in 2017, "and quickly outpaced Starbucks to hold more locations in its Chinese market, then went public on the Nasdaq. Only a few short years later, in 2020, Luckin admitted that it had inflated its sales — a confession that resulted in its removal from the Nasdaq and the agreement to pay a $180 million penalty." 

Here's more from RetailDive: 

Luckin Coffee filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy and exited administration in 2022, minus the executive team that had overseen the accounting fraud. Since then, the coffee chain has surpassed Starbucks to be China's largest coffee retailer in terms of sales. 

Here's the brand's warm-and-fuzzy background story, perhaps written by a bot:

Luckin Coffee is a pioneer of a technology-driven new retail model that offers coffee and other F&B products of high quality, high affordability and high convenience to our customers. 

Our vision is to build a world-class coffee brand and become part of everyone's daily life. 

Technology is at the core of our business. Our technology runs across every aspect of our business, from customer engagement and storefront operations to supply chain management. We leverage our ever-evolving big data analytics and AI to analyze the huge volume of data generated from our operations and continuously optimize our systems. Our focus on technology has enabled us to efficiently elevate customer experience and to grow rapidly with uncompromised quality control. 

The storefront on Broadway and Eighth was previously a Sunglass Hut.