Good morning. Beer or Coffee?

The question I get the most about Russia is, "Do they really drink vodka all the time?" No, they don't drink vodka as much as we think, but they do remain pickled the whole day. There's a popular saying here that says a beer in the morning means it's your day off. I go to my bus stop at 7:15 AM and I always see at least one guy going to work drinking his first beer of the day. 7:15 AM.

I've asked my Russian friends if this was normal. Oh no, they all assure me, these are very bad people; alcoholics; it is not socially acceptable. Judging by the fact that I see it every day, it's not THAT socially unacceptable. My thought was replace morning alcohol culture with coffee culture. If you were look at a bus/metro stop in the US at 7:15 AM, what would be the most popular beverage present? Coffee, the drug of choice for the proletariat. Want to know why my solution won't work? Opening times. In my part of the city, I've only found one place where you can get coffee to go. It opens at 11. I could get a beer at, literally, any hour of the day and on any street. For example, there is a store called "The Beer House" that opens at 10, a full hour before the only cafe in the Chkalov district that serves coffee to go opens.

I was discussing this with a Russian colleague of mine and I said I was going to start opening up coffee kiosks near the metros. It would never work, she said (half-seriously), the workers would steal money from the till to buy alcohol.