Liquor & Guns

The people's right to trade freely with their neighbors and those in neighboring states shall not be infringed. 

One line like that in the Constitution would have rendered the PLCB largely impotent, but it didn't work out that way. The right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Constitution. The right to buy alcohol is not. Both have laws governing their sale and use, but only one has the state trying to make sure you can get it: Liquor. 

Proponents of the State Store System are always pushing for and bragging about having more sales. They want to make sure that all the citizens can buy booze, but they don't want to make sure you can buy a Constitutionally guaranteed item, or have freedom of choice or be allowed to participate in interstate commerce. That, of course, would puncture their precious monopoly, and show how non-competitive they really are.

But this is -- supposedly -- all about control. Let's look at that whole concept from a different angle. If you are like me or most people I know, you probably think guns are more dangerous than a bottle of Captain Morgan. But according to State Store-style thinking, you would be wrong. I drink, and I also shoot. I probably drink more often than I shoot, but it's close, since my range is only a mile away. Let me tell you: I worry more about the guy next to me at the range than I do about the guy next to me at the bar. Just think about these comparisons.

• What takes longer to buy: a special order bottle of liquor or a special order gun (even with the federally-mandated wait time on gun sales)?

• As a private citizen, you can sell guns, but you can't sell alcohol beverages.

• Sell a bottle and you can get fined $4 an ounce and go to jail.  Sell a gun...and you get cash.

• If you're 18, you can buy a gun; if you're 14, you can get a hunting license. Buy a beer when you're 18, and you can LOSE your license.

• Most places you are allowed to open carry a gun on the street in PA ; most places you are not allowed to carry an open bottle.

• If you are a resident with the proper permit, you can have a loaded gun on the front seat of your car. If you have an open bottle, there is no permit you can get.

• If you are visiting from out of state and have a gun in your trunk and want to stop and take in any of Pennsylvania's scenic attractions as you pass through the state -- it is perfectly legal.  Have a bottle of wine from New Jersey in your trunk and make that same stop? You can be fined, and your wine will be seized and destroyed. 

• You can bring a number of guns into Pennsylvania without any special licenses or forms and shoot.  You can't bring any bottles of wine, beer, or spirits into the state -- legally! -- without special licenses or forms which the PLCB does not even make available to you.*

People who use guns professionally in their job have to be licensed, but people who sell alcohol professionally (like bartenders) don't. They don't have to be certified by the state in any way, unless and until they make an illegal sale, which seems to me like closing the barn door after the horse ran away. Our State Store alcohol sellers don't even have to be certified in any way at all, nor are they ever checked for illegal sales (they rely on 'self-reporting'). Does anybody find this strange based on all of the above?

Most states have figured out how to regulate the sale of alcohol and not treat their citizens like children. If the liquor laws in the state were even close to being like the gun laws, there wouldn't be a privatization effort (or a modernization one either) because the dead hand of leftover Prohibitionism wouldn't be on the backs of the residents. Since that isn't going to happen, we have to take control away from the state through our legislature. Give retail back to private industry where it belongs, because when the state decides what you will get, it also decides what you want and does it without any input from you.

We are not safer, we are not better served, and we are not satisfied. Privatize.


* I challenge any reader to try to find the form or forms needed to pay the taxes on 6 bottles of liquor you want to bring into the state. Good luck. 

30 years of progress – You’re kidding right?

The PLCB's "Store in a store" modernization idea: 
the Future through (the failures of) the Past

In the early 1980s the PLCB first came up with the idea of putting a State Store inside a real regular store. Boscov’s in Wilkes Barre and Joseph Horne Co., Pittsburgh were the two selected. It didn’t last as the Wilkes-Barre Store closed in late 1991 and the Pittsburgh one in 1993.

However, like most bad ideas that occur to the PLCB, the concept wouldn’t die, and on December 23, 2003 the PLCB started the first State Store inside a grocery store as part of the “modernization” of that time. Some of them are still around. The PLCB has managed to place about 16 stores within stores in over ten years of trying to convince grocery store owners of the value of this concept (and kept them in longer than the wine kiosks, but that's not saying much).

So here we are, 30 years after the original concept, ten years after the second attempt...and this kludgey idea is part of the PLCB's “modernization” plan. Thousands of grocery and retail stores ain’t buying it, and after 30 years of trying, at the rate the PLCB is getting stores in stores, it will take over 110 years to get up to just 10% of the state stores being 'more convenient' (unless they close more stores as they have been, that will make 10% easier to hit!), if you define 'convenient' as being able to walk into a different store and make a separate purchase.

Einstein's widely misquoted as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. No matter who actually said it -- and we know there aren’t any Einsteins at the PLCB -- the core is solid. That's what makes the latest 'modernization' idea from Representative Gene DiGirolamo to put 400 square ft. State Stores in grocery stores...a little nuts. But his plan is endorsed by the clerks union (even if the plan essentially is a wine kiosk without the automation, though there will still be a PLCB employee there to make the sales, just like there was when the wine kiosks didn't work). This goes to show how out of touch the PLCB really is.While national trends in alcohol retail are toward larger stores, the brain trust at the PLCB wants to do the opposite. Must be that lack of retail experience, or maybe the fact that they know we can't go anywhere else that lets them make these bad decisions.

Kind of what the store in a store would look like...minus the video.

I was told by a clerk that larger towns will have more selection and that little towns will have less selection and all I could think of is that a little selection in a little town beats NO selection in a little town.  With only 600 stores there are a whole lot of little towns without a state store and there are entire counties in PA with only one state store but but they have a number grocery stores.

However...remember that the PLCB and the Union threaten that if the State's monopoly were broken up and privatized, you will only see one aisle with only the most popular items in grocery stores and they won’t have the full selection of a State Store. Now I have to ask: if one side of a 50’ (which is short for a grocery store) 4 shelf aisle is a minimum of 300 square ft and you don’t have to have room for a cashier or baskets or office or safe...how is this "store in a store" going to provide any better selection? And you still can’t buy a case or a sixpack of beer there, so the three trip problem (that ONLY Pennsylvania has) is still there. Maybe they think that 2 1/2 trips are an improvement: go to the PLCB store in a store (with separate checkout), walk to a different part of the store to the 'cafe' to buy a sixpack (with a separate checkout), and then drive to the beer distributor to get a case. Such an improvement!

Here's a thought. How about we privatize the whole damn system and make it truly easier for the consumer by having just one place to go when shopping for a legal product? How about we get the state out of subsidizing the sale of alcohol like they do milk? How about if we take the totally unqualified board out of retail, since they know nothing about it anyway (none has any experience in retail and that has been true for decades) and turn it over to people who do know retail business i.e. private businesses? How about if we allow the people the freedom of choice that most citizens who don’t live in Utah or PA enjoy? If you are a legislator, how can you not want this for your constituents?

Real Modernization IS Privatization!

Let’s talk Turkey

Turkey -- 98% Muslim, a religion that forbids alcohol consumption. By far the lowest per capita alcohol consumption in the EU (Turkey is currently an EU candidate) at 2.7 liters per person aged 15 or older per year. The current population is 74 million people. There are over 200,000 places to buy alcohol beverages (according to Turkey's major newspaper, Hürriyet Daily News), but we'll round that DOWN to 200,000. That gives this relatively abstemious Muslim country a retail outlet for alcohol beverages for every 370 people.

Pennsylvania -- Generally considered Christian in religion; 42% do not claim to belong to any major church. Roman Catholics are the largest religious group, just under 4 million, but there are significant numbers of Protestants who belong to churches that frown on drinking, and some that outright forbid it. Per capita consumption is just under 4 times that of Turkey at 8.2 liters person aged 14 or older per year. The current population is 12.76 million people. There are 600 State Stores, about 1200 beer distributors, and 17,735 active liquor licenses (restaurants, delis, clubs, resorts, hotels, etc., according to the PLCB's own online database), or a total of 19,535. We'll round that up to 20,000, even though many liquor licensees do not exercise the option sell takeout (most restaurants, for example); we also have to recognize that the great majority of these are allowed to sell takeout beer only. That gives this modern, progressive, Western state a retail outlet for alcohol beverages for every 614 people. That's about half as many as in the Muslim country of Turkey (where ALL the stores are privately owned). Makes you wonder how and why Turkey has a lower alcohol death rate and lower DUI rate than PA with all those places to buy alcohol.

Reason #1 -- We're Adults

Oh, where to begin?

I knew when I started this that the tough part would be picking the first reason to abolish the PLCB. Should it be the government retail monopoly, or the crap selection, or the loss of revenue to bordering states, or the 18% Emergency Tax, or the lack of service to retail accounts, or the costs of the State Store system, or the licensing system... The list just goes on and on, and they're all terrible.

But when you get down to the root of it, the base cause and source of the problems with the PLCB is that it reeks of the patronizing attitude of do-gooders. We, the itty-bitty wittle citizens of the Commonwealth, just can't handle our liquor -- or wine -- so the State has to do that for us.

Reason #1 on why the PLCB should be abolished:

We deserve to be treated like adults.

Just look at the name of the organization: the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. They are in place to control our access to booze*, to control the price of it, to control where and when we can buy it, to control who makes all the money off the sale of it, to control what kinds of booze we're allowed to have**. The state's Liquor Code even controls our choice to buy booze out of state; although the liquor stores right across the border may be closer, may have better prices, better selections, better service, better stores, we are not allowed to buy booze there and bring it home. If we do, the State will -- if they can -- arrest us, fine us, seize the booze and destroy it.

The PLCB's not Big Brother: it's Daddy.

I've often said, in reference to various liquor laws (but most often Pennsylvania's), all I want is to be treated like an adult. Don't tell me I can't have a beer because it's got a picture of Santa on the label, don't tell me I can't buy booze on a Sunday, don't tell me I can only buy two sixpacks at a time in a bar and no sixpacks in a beer store, and don't tell me that the State has to control the sale of booze because otherwise I'd go crazy with it.

Don't tell me that, because it's pure D horseshit. Maryland doesn't control it, I can buy a bottle of rye whiskey in a drugstore (and I have, by God), and the Free State† seems to have a pleasantly civilized populace. New Jersey doesn't control it, and in the months I spent researching New Jersey Breweries I didn't see any evidence of a state that was drinking itself to ruin.

This is, we're told over and over, a free country. I once heard a priest ask in a July 4th homily "Is any one of us truly free?" and I was so irked I still remember it bitterly. Yes, within the responsibilities I have undertaken and the accountability honor and law require, by my lights I am free. Just the fact that I'm writing this blog, an opinion, openly stated, against the laws of the State, proves that to some degree.

If we're free, how does the State get away with telling us where we can buy booze? What's so dangerous about booze -- compared to other dangerous things like cars, guns, propane, cigarettes, diesel fuel and ammonia fertilizer, power tools, gasoline, and horny goat weed -- that the State forbids private citizens to sell it? It's pure bluenosed patrician elitism, a ludicrous hangover from Prohibition and Repeal, an attitude that should have been washed away years ago.

The PLCB should be abolished because it assumes the citizens of Pennsylvania are incompetent to handle their own affairs: a deadly insult to our honor and intelligence in a democratic nation. We deserve laws about booze that rightly assume adult citizens will drink responsibly, as the majority of drinkers do.

More to come.


*I'm going to refer to liquor and wine where interchangeable as "booze." Usually I refer to beer separately in this blog's context because of the division imposed by the state's two retail regimes, but I'll sometimes use "booze" to refer to all three because I like it better than "alcohol beverages," and a lot better than "alcoholic beverages."

**Note to the PLCB: two of the reasons I started this blog was because you stopped carrying Connemara Irish whiskey, and you stopped carrying Elijah Craig 12 year old in 750 ml bottles. Shouldn't have done that...

†"This nickname originated in an article written by Hamilton Owens, the editor or the Baltimore Sun. In 1923, a Georgia Congressman, William D. Upshaw, attacked Maryland as a traitor to the union because it never passed a State enforcement act supporting Prohibition. Hamilton Owens' article, "The Maryland Free State" was a mocking response to Mr. Upshaw, suggesting that Maryland should secede from the Union before acting to prohibit the sale of liquor. This article was never published but Mr. Owens referred to Maryland as "The Free State" in later editorials."

I love footnotes...