Starbucks seeks to sell beer and wine in downtown SLO

Starbucks is seeking to sell beer and wine at its downtown San Luis Obispo coffeehouse, likely part of a push by the company to attract more customers in the evenings.

The company has applied for an on-sale beer and wine license at 885 Higuera St., near the Downtown Centre Cinema, according to a public notice posted this week by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

If the license is issued, the San Luis Obispo location would become the second Starbucks in San Luis Obispo County to offer beer and wine.

The Arroyo Grande City Council recently approved a conditional use permit allowing the coffee giant to sell craft beer and wine at the store at 924 W. Branch St. next to the Regal Arroyo Grande Stadium 10 movie theater.

The new offerings will be rolled out in Arroyo Grande with a small renovation to the building’s front patio area this summer.

The company has been rolling out new food, craft beer and wine options at some of its locations across the country in concept called Starbucks Evenings.

In response to questions about the plans for the San Luis Obispo location, a Starbucks spokesperson wrote in an email: “We’re still in the early stages of considering bringing the Evenings menu to our store in San Luis Obispo. It’s a long and thoughtful process, and the permit filing is just one of many steps we take.”

ABC spokesman John Carr said the type of alcohol license that Starbucks applied for in San Luis Obispo allows for on-site consumption, but there are license privileges that allow for patrons to take unopened cans or bottles off the premises.

The application for a new license was filed Feb. 6 by Coffee House Holdings Inc., a subsidiary of Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. A license could be issued within 45 to 90 days, though if the license is protested to ABC the process could take much longer, Carr said in an email.

Any protests would have to be received by ABC within 30 days, according to the notice.

Starbucks does not need a use permit from the city of San Luis Obispo to sell beer and wine. Only a request by the business — which is classified as a restaurant in the city’s zoning regulations — to serve alcohol past 11 p.m. would trigger the need for a use permit, assistant planner Walter Oetzell said. The downtown San Luis Obispo location does not stay open past 10 or 10:30 p.m., according to its hours of operation listed online.

But Starbucks will have to show ABC that public convenience or necessity would be served with the issuance of a new license because the downtown area is already overconcentrated with both on- and off-sale licenses.

ABC considers the downtown area to be in a state of “undue concentration” because the ratio of on- and off-sale licenses to the population in the downtown census tract — which is mostly businesses, with fewer than 3,600 residents — exceeds the ratio of on-sale retail licenses to the population in San Luis Obispo County.

The county ratio is one on-sale license per 377 people, according to ABC. By this standard, only nine on-sale licenses would be authorized downtown, according to the most recent information issued by ABC last fall. There are currently 71 active on-sale licenses in the downtown area.

This situation is not unique to San Luis Obispo, as many communities might want to situate bars and restaurants in a certain district, so there ends up being a higher concentration of those types of businesses, Carr said in a previous interview.

On Thursday, he said Starbucks (or any applicant pursuing a new license in an overconcentrated area) would have to show “that public convenience or necessity would be served by their business providing products and/or services different and unique to the area, and that existing ABC licensed businesses in the area do not provide.”

This story was originally published February 17, 2016 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Starbucks seeks to sell beer and wine in downtown SLO."