Amazon Has Opened a Secret Liquor Store In LA — Sort of

It was announced earlier this week that Amazon had applied for a license to open a liquor store in San Francisco’s Dogpatch section. Having a brick-and-mortar wine and spirits outlet would give the online commerce behemoth the right to deliver alcohol around the city through its Prime Now service. In a number of cities around the U.S., Prime Now already delivers groceries and staples from Whole Foods Markets.

The license application has been widely covered in the news. But apparently nobody noticed that Amazon already has a California liquor store — opened in February in a neighborhood of northeastern Los Angeles. The existence of this previously unreported outlet was revealed by Wine-Searcher, an online wine database and search engine.

California law requires any operation that delivers wine and spirits to have a brick-and-mortar location — hence the San Francisco application. However, an Amazon spokesperson told Wine-Searcher, “It’s not accurate to call [the L.A. operation] a store. It’s simply a semantic language requirement as part of the licensing process.”

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Residents of San Francisco spend about $875 a year on alcohol, a very high amount, no doubt, but certainly not the highest. In fact, these are the cities that spend the most on alcohol.

Whether or not it’s a store, Wine-Searcher points out that Amazon would be required to comply with California Alcohol Beverage Control regulations. Among other things, this means that the store (or non-store) would have to be open for eight hours a day on any day it plans to deliver wine and that all alcoholic beverages on sale would have to be “displayed” to the public. However, the display could be “by way of electronic, on-line, or other form of catalog.”

In other words, apparently, if you want to buy a bottle of cabernet or a fifth of Johnnie Walker from the store, you can stop by and look it up online. Just like you could from home, since the brick-and-mortar location would now allow Prime Now to deliver it.

But it’s not just alcohol you can have Prime Now deliver to you. Maybe the online retail giant is trying to get more people to watch Prime shows, but whatever the reason it, Amazon has come up with a way help people binge watch shows.

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