Starbucks to Sell Beer and Wine at Even More Locations

Your vanilla latte just got really fun.

Hoping to skew our judgments into buying even more of those damn cake pops, Starbucks is now selling booze.

Well, they’ve been selling booze, at a select number of locations, but they’re now expanding their beer and wine sales.

Starbucks has already been experimenting with their alcohol sales at six West Coast locations. And basically, the results of those experiments are: people love getting wasted. Because of that fact, Starbucks announced yesterday that it will sell beer and wine in as many as 25 locations by the end of the year.

So does this technically make Starbucks baristas bartenders? If so, can I stop listening to their personal problems/standup material and start telling them mine?

Starbucks has already been offering alcohol in Seattle and Portland, and now Southern California and Atlanta are next on the list. The beer will sell for $5 while wine prices range from $7 to $9. Nice to see they’re not abandoning their bottom line of overcharging for everything.

“I think it creates more problems than it may be worth,” says Bob Goldin, an executive VP at a consulting firm.

Problem #1: The bathrooms. If they weren’t bad enough already, imagine them after those Starbucks loiterers have about five Coors Lights in their bladders. Mix that with caffeine, and you have a recipe for a toilet disaster.

Clarice Turner, Starbucks’ Senior VP of U.S. operations says that the decision to sell booze just fits in with the Starbucks way of life.

“It’s just a natural place for people to connect and unwind,” Turner said.