One of my wife's pet peeves is the use of "there's" instead of "there are," as in the last line here. What's up with this? It's very common. Is it simply easier to articulate?
"Plural there's" was discussed a few years ago on LL:
In those posts, I present some evidence to support Arnold Zwicky's suggestion that
…"there's" + <plural noun phrase> should really be characterized, in current English, as merely informal/colloquial, rather than nonstandard. Millions of people (like me) who wouldn't use "there is two people at the door" are entirely happy with "there's two people at the door".
The same thing seems to be true of "here's" — thus today's Google News returns these counts:
|here is a few||6|
|here's a few||256|
|here are a few||684|
|here're a few||1|
As for why this is true, I don't have a good answer. The obvious answers (like "It's hard to pronounce the re-articulated /r/ sounds in there're) seem like post-hoc rationalizations to me — the rhyming part of there're is exactly the same as error and terror, at least for many speakers, and there's no evidence that those words are disfavored as a result.