Wine In Supermarkets

If you’ve ever traveled to a state that doesn’t have some goofy post-Prohibition-era restriction on selling hooch in grocery stores, you know what a thrill it can be. People in New York are trying to allow supermarkets to sell wine, a cause that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the zero-sum world of commercial entities arguing over who stands to make or lose money. In short, New York wine makers want to sell more of their product while mom-and-pop liquor stores want to restrict other businesses.

The idea that it’s more convenient and probably cheaper for a consumer to be able to go into a supermarket and buy wine doesn’t seem to come up. Or at least “consumers” don’t in and of themselves constitute a constituency that anyone wants to lobby for. Sure, we feel “bad” for the mom-and-pop liquor stores, but the role of government isn’t or shouldn’t be to prop up certain storeowners.

The frustrating thing is that most of the reporting about this issue tends to be skewed toward the urban liquor store owners, where there’s a built-in Shop Around The Corner good guy/bad guy narrative. You don’t get the other side of the story, where people who live in rural areas might actually benefit from having more than one place to buy hooch within however many miles.

But even if you focus on the urban storeowners’ arguments, there’s a logical inconsistency:

[The owner of a] wine shop [who] has run wine stores in Little Italy for more than 24 years, says letting supermarkets get into the wine business would push out small stores.

“They’ve already taken away the fishmongers, the butchers and the bakers — and now they want the wine people as well,” [he] said of supermarkets. “I don’t understand why they need more profit.”

He said he goes out of his way to stock New York area wines and that if given the chance, supermarkets wouldn’t. “I carry 30 wines from New York,” [he] said. “Supermarkets will sell the most generic crap they can make money off of. It will be a very pedestrian wine selection.”

Again, no one’s talking about the consumer — if supermarkets sell cheap “pedestrian” wine, doesn’t that open up the mom-and-pop stores to expand their selection? If supermarkets stock the big sellers, suddenly the mom-and-pop shelf space won’t have to be taken up with generic or otherwise pedestrian crap. I never understood this part in particular. And if you want to even playing fields, take the extra step and allow liquor stores to sell food — that way they could really cater to a high-ticket clientele . . .