And Apparently “Flâneur” Is Not Some Sort Of Cheap Brandy — Who Knew?

What is it that the Times doesn’t “get” about $2 nips of Georgi? Like it’s so fucking complicated:

Paretti’s Liquor Store sits opposite the Queensbridge housing project, amid the warehouses that line 21st Street in this part of northwest Queens. A red and yellow banner above the front windows proclaims a “Blow Out Sale,” and steel capital letters spell out the word “Liquor,” but the neon tubes within the letters no longer glow.

Inside, several rows of tiny airplane-type bottles of vodka, whiskey and gin, called nips, are stacked against the inch-thick bulletproof glass that separates clerks from customers.

In a city famous for extravagant and showy drinking — consider the rainbow-colored cosmopolitans of “Sex and the City” — this liquor store, in the shadow of the city’s largest public housing project, with upward of 7,000 residents, caters to a decidedly less glamorous end of the alcohol market.

. . .

A few days later, on a slow Sunday, the store was in the hands of a 26-year-old clerk named Martin Sladek, who wears his blond hair in a faux hawk and speaks with a thick Czech accent.

“Drug dealers buy Hennessy, and drug users buy Georgi,” Mr. Sladek announced at one point. “Crackheads get Georgi nips.”

. . .

The customers trickled in.

Two women who looked barely old enough to buy a legal beer peered through the bulletproof glass, mulling their options before choosing Smirnoff vodka. When they asked for glasses, Mr. Sladek handed them two green plastic cups, which they took with them when they left.

A middle-aged woman hobbled in on a cane.

“What time you closing up, Marty?” she asked. “Give me that $2 bottle of Georgi.”

But seriously — color pieces on liquor stores in shitty neighborhoods are much fresher now than they were two years ago, right?