Alcohol in Grocery Stores

Until very recently, Washington was one of those states in which you need to go to a dedicated liquor store in order to purchase hard alcohol. You could purchase beer and wine in grocery stores, but that's it.

Last November, we passed some voter-sponsored initiatives that put hard alcohol into grocery stores and closed all of the state-run liquor stores.  See, here in Washington, we can get damn near anything through, if we can get enough signatures on petitions.

My parents are teetotalers. They even use the word "Teetotaler" from time to time.

I'm not. I'm not stupid with booze - being brought up in a dry household will do that for you. But I do enjoy a drink every now and again.

But I don't think that hard alcohol should be found in liquor stores. If it weren't for the cooking uses of beer and wine, I'd be opposed to their presence in grocery stores, too.

It's not a matter of poor impulse control.  It's not because I don't trust grocery stores.

It's pricing and selection.

When the state ran the liquor stores, each manufacturer only needed to supply one customer. This meant that costs to ship to Washington State were low - if you only have to worry about delivering to one or two warehouses, you don't need a full fleet of trucks. If you only have one customer, it's a simple matter to handle invoicing and billing for the state. No big deal for the big names, but the smaller companies may have to double or triple their staff to keep up with the increased paperwork - and that means an increase in prices.

And that's before we talk about the taxes. Don't get me started on the taxes. Really.

When the state ran the liquor stores, if I wanted something that they didn't have, it was easy to special order it. The state had a list of beverage manufacturers, because they were licensed with the state.

While many grocery stores can still special order product, it's more difficult - especially if you want something more obscure. Because the grocery store has to query the state to make sure it's legal to sell (x). And they need to jump through hoops to get the SKU set up in their system so they can order it.

Take Absinthe, for example.  There are a number of legal varieties of the stuff out there.  Do you know how many I can get in my local grocery stores?

Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. None.

Why not?  There is a public perception that the stuff is illegal, so they're hesitant to order it in. Then, once all the hoops are jumped through, it's a low-profit item for them - if they have to order case quantities (which wouldn't surprise me), and I only want one bottle, then they are stuck with the rest of the case. And it may or may not sell. Meaning they end up paying storage on it until either I come back for another bottle (in eight months or a year or more) or they write it off.

So now I can't get Absinthe. Which is a shame, because I actually like it. Occasionally.

If we had specialty liquor stores (state-run or not), then the availability thing wouldn't be as big of an issue.

And we do have a few - but they are inevitably within a block or so of a big chain grocery store that buys alcoholic beverages by the truckload.

Can you guess who will have the better prices?

Can you guess who is likely to stick around longer?

I feel bad for all the new small business owners that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the old stock and locations of the state-run liquor stores.

And yes, I know. There are specialty Beer and Wine stores in the area. There have been for years. And I don't know how they have survived - but they are (by now) run by businessmen who know what they're doing, and who are used to a relatively stable market.  I suspect that a small handful of specialty liquor stores will survive, but the majority of them are going to close, probably within six months or a year.

Long-term, I think that the voters in this state shot themselves in the foot.

And I really don't like that.