Eden Prairie hopes to trick residents into buying more booze

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik

​Eden Prairie has three municipal liquor stores, but the City Council is considering a plan to take the smallest of the three and moving it to a much larger and more visible location. If you can get your residents to drink more booze, why not do it? It will help fix up all the roads they drive drunk on.

The City Council will consider the update on Sept. 1. They hope moving to a site with more than double the space of the current store and in a more prominent location near the Rainbow Foods could bring in more profits for the city to improve roads and buildings in the city. The three current stores bring in about $1 million a year and are usually in the top 5 for sales in the state.

The store currently sits in the Prairie View Shopping Center on Hwy. 5 and Prairie Center Drive and would move to a larger space in the shopping center.

The move would cost $400,000 and lead to a bigger monthly lease, which leads some city leaders to question the plan.

Mayor Phil Young and Council Members Brad Aho and Jon Duckstad aren't so jazzed about the idea.

From the Star Tribune:

They say the space that's available -- the former Snyder's Drug Store -- is bigger than needed. At more than 9,000 square feet, it's more than double the space of the current store. And they were not convinced that spending roughly $400,000 to outfit it as a liquor store as well as paying more in rent would pay off in greater sales.

Aho said he favors a somewhat bigger store at a better location. But "to spend $400,000 on top of a more expensive lease, I am having a hard time seeing that we are going to come out ahead on that.''

Said Young: "We are taking a store that, no matter what we have done to it, has lagged in terms of sales. What I am not going to do is double the size of the laggard store without a good reason for doing it.''