Nearest convience store outside Penn and Grand Central to buy beer to go?

[CandOforprogress2]

 Starbucks everywhere but what about 7/11 or like stores?

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Are you afraid of asking a local to direct you to the nearest bodega??

[NKP guy]

For Penn Station:  Just about every product and vice that's for sale on this planet can be found on Eighth Avenue.

For liquor (and I'm fairly sure for beer), there's a liquor store on the east side of the Avenue between 31st and 30th Streets.

For GCT:  Lexington Avenue, 3rd Avenue, and 2nd Avenue, all south of 42nd Street would be where I would look for beer-to-go.

For everything else:  There's a fully stocked Duane Reade on every street corner in Manhattan.  

[RME]

CandOforprogress2

Starbucks everywhere but what about 7/11 or like stores?

When did they start selling beer in Starbucks?  (Some form of latte-flavored weissbier is probably a coming silly food-fad, but as Lucius Beebe so famously said "I shall not be there".

There are very few chain convenience stores like 7-11 in Manhattan for the same basic reason there are few Wal-Marts there: too much overhead and 'name'-related expense for the business model to work effectively, for the long term required for buildout cost recovery in that real-estate market.  You could always go to the Yale Club (adjacent to GCT on Vanderbilt Avenue) or the Princeton Club on 43rd, as I suspect your cadging skills might extend to getting a tab started before certain credentials are demanded.  (I think you still need a jacket and tie, though...)

What you have instead is (or was) foreign-owned small groceries and little specialty stores ... and yes, you need a reasonably up-to-date reference that shows what stores are where, and what they stock.  (I was expecting some sort of app for this, but apparently Silicon Alley wasn't up to the challenge )

Nobody in their right mind would look for beer value close to NYP or GCT, or the PA terminals either.  In the old days, it would 'pay' to use trips on a MetroCard or transfer to go places that had particularly good products or service.  For instance, back in the day you could have gotten from either Penn or Grand Central fairly easily to One Fifth, where you could have New Amsterdam black-and-tans to your heart's content and every third one or so was free.  Or you could arrange to go uptown on the subway to around 116th on the West Side, where several good delis serve the relatively-demanding Columbia market.  The key is knowing where to go, and factoring in the time and/or cost to get there, in the time 'between trains'.