There’s a development in the liquor world that is overshadowed by all the news about happy hour and kids being allowed in pubs.
Major lenders have frozen new loans and financing to private liquor-store owners until the outcome of the booze-in-groceries discussion becomes clear. Sources around B.C. have reported that credit has dried up for numerous operators.
It’s a measure of how uncertain the future of that industry has become since the government tasked Liberal MLA John Yap with conducting a liquor-policy review.
Yap waded into the complicated file with gusto and has stirred up huge public interest in some revolutionary — for B.C. — ideas. The website for the review has been visited 76,000 times. With not much else going on, it’s been one of the dominant public-policy issues.
And one of the most eye-catching ideas involved allowing sale of liquor in grocery stores.
Yap was publicly enthusiastic about it even before the review was complete. When he finished it and delivered it to Attorney General Suzanne Anton in November, he held a news conference to say it included a thumbs-up to booze in grocery stores.
Fuming private liquor-store owners are still lobbying to quash the idea, but it looks like it’s a go. The target is to introduce legislation to accomplish all the changes this year.
The association of private liquor stores warned in a brief to the review that the move is a lot more complicated than it appears.
The main driver for the concept is the idea of convenience. But there are a number of questions about whether that will prove out.
Yap said it was strongly favoured by people during the review. But that may be based on a hazy notion that it will be just like the U.S., where customers go to a Fred Meyer and put liquor in their grocery carts at a fraction of the B.C. price.
Travellers who recall that experience and think it’s going to happen here are mistaken.
Prices will stay the same because they were off limits during the review. The government needs the billion dollars a year in revenue brought in by the high markups. So there will be no price-cutting. And if the idea proceeds, it will be a store-within-store model, so customers will go through two checkouts, not one.
There’s also the suggestion the idea tackles a problem that doesn’t exist. The one thing you can’t accuse the B.C. Liberal government of doing is making booze purchases inconvenient. Hundreds of private stores have opened in the last decade. There are 53 of them in Greater Victoria, to go with 14 government liquor stores. And more than 90 per cent are adjacent to a grocery store. Under the original vision, they were to take over the retail market completely once all the government stores were shut down. That plan ran off the rails.
Since the moratorium on new liquor stores will remain in effect, the only way grocery stores will sell booze is if a current store operator moves in or the licence moves.
And that raises the question of where grocery stores would find room. Some of the private stores have developed into sizable retail shops with a wide selection.
There’s no room for that in most jam-packed grocery stores. Under the standard configuration, the most a consumer could expect would be a few hundred square feet of floor space carved out of the store to carry a few mainstream beer and wine brands. The association of private stores says it is a big seller of B.C. wines and the thriving craft-beer segment. It’s hard to see where groceries could find room to continue stocking all those brands.
Contrary to assumptions, there’s no evidence of a concerted push by the big grocery stores to get into the booze business. The idea came up during the government’s hearings and Yap decided to run with it.
He’s generated a lot of excitement so far, much of it with the grocery-store idea. The question is whether the change will amount to much once implemented.
