A woman in Price Chopper asked me if I wanted to sign a petition urging New York state lawmakers to allow wine to be sold in supermarkets and other big-box stores. Politely, I said no thank you and walked on, though part of me was tempted to let her--and any shoppers with earshot--know why.
There are a few reasons to oppose such legislation, including the fact that, statistically, it appears that underage alcohol purchases are more likely in supermarkets than in traditional liquor stores. But the main reason I'm against it is it would be another unnecessary and unwise blow to small, local, independent businesses.
In the words of Berkshire County wineseller Jim Nejaime (Nejaime's Wine Cellars): “It would do what we’ve done in our communities to hardware stores and drug stores that were owner-run and that provided more personal attention to the community," many of whom were muscled out by powerful national chains.
In this case, the obvious need to regulate the sale of liquor has protected the local, owner-run stores until now, and one very good reason to keep it that way is that when out-of-state chains like Hannaford and Wal-Mart (Price Chopper being an exception) get a larger slice of the pie, guess what? A larger slice of the pie gets served up to the corporate bosses in some other state. In fact, I wonder if Gov. Paterson, who is salivating over a potential increase in tax revenue if he gets his way on this legislation, has bothered to take into consideration the fact that revenues from sales at locally owned stores recirculate through the local economy at a much greater rate than sales at big boxes.
Massachusetts, which rejected a similar proposal a few years back, restricts the number of liquor licenses proportional to the population of any given town, though it does allow grocery stores to apply for available licenses--a compromise Nejaime thinks is fair.
Read more on this topic in B.A. Nilsson's food column in the coming issue of Metroland.
--Stephen Leon
