Should the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board implement its plan to sell wine through small boutique stores and machine dispensers?
I'd like to encourage all of you to go vote NO... and here's why. It may sound like this is a good thing: more stores, more ways to buy booze, and wine in supermarkets. But look: this is just another way to make the state booze monopoly palatable enough that you'll keep saying "Well, it's not that bad." It is that bad. We are not children, to have the State tell us that we can't handle selling wine, let alone buying it. This is a retail monopoly of a legal food product. Don't encourage them to expand their franchise! Besides, the "boutique stores" which are actually inside cafes are blatantly unfair to the other businesses who won't get them. Exactly the problem with a monopoly: you don't get the choice, they do.
This is wrong in so many ways. Go vote NO, now.
Update: 73% NO! Thank you, Pennsylvania!
Sorry, but I just think the idea of wine from a machine is just dumb and a waste of time and money. I don't know of many people that enjoy wine that would want to purchase it from a machine. I don't see what the PLCB is trying to accomplish there. And as far as boutique stores are concerned...I agree with your comment that the monoply gets to choose and I would not trust the PLCB to open a fair system to choose the places that get to sell it.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious as to if this could be the beginning of a plan to close some slower stores (locations running in the red) in cities that have multiple state store locations. They could drop all the overhead of an actual outlet and then from a marketing perspective, add a couple of these "vending" machines, and state that they are actually offering more locations and better convenience to their customers (just sucks if you happen to prefer spirits over wine). Then again maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist and the PLCB has my best interests at heart.
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