What’s the harm in a glass of wine? If we buy it from grocery-store chains, it seems, we’ll be drunk and dead in a matter of weeks. At least that’s what liquor-store owners want us to believe, should Ballot Question One pass.
Trouble is, few Bay Staters actually believe the commonwealth will be overrun with drunken teenagers if Shaw’s starts selling wine, and even fewer are willing to sacrifice convenience so that a 1934 law can stay on the books.
Perhaps if Vote No on 1, the group behind the Kerry Healey–style attack ads, fought with facts rather than sensationalism, they’d have a shot at winning voters’ sympathy. After all, at its heart the ballot question represents a David-and-Goliath fight in which huge supermarket chains are poised to grow fatter at the expense of independent package stores, many of which may struggle to survive. That’s because Question One would create a new type of license that would allow both independent grocers and big chains to sell wine — the latter in more than three stores throughout the state, as stipulated by current law — while leaving liquor stores mired in the old permitting process.
Kim Hinden, spokesperson for Yes on 1: Grocery Stores and Consumers for Fair Competition, which has spearheaded an effective campaign against Vote No on 1, says “there’s no evidence in the 34 other states [that sell wine in grocery stores] that there’s any negative impact on small businesses.” Yet statistics rarely lie. In Florida, for instance, which has a long history of permitting wine sales by grocers, roughly 64 percent of all wine sales occur at such stores — and that’s excluding big-box wholesalers such as BJ’s and Costco.
Plus, while Hinden claims the ballot proposition “doesn’t necessarily help out the grocers as much as one would think,” Yes on 1’s list of financial contributors reads like the supermarket section of a phone book, with only 18 donors — 16 of whom are grocers or directly involved with the industry — coughing up more than $5 million. (Stop & Shop alone has contributed more than $2.3 million to the campaign.) By contrast, approximately 586 individual donors, the majority of which are independent package-store owners and distributors, have spent $2.97 million to oppose the ballot question.
As it stands, state law already allows grocers, convenience stores, and gas stations to sell alcohol. But Massachusetts issues a finite number of alcohol licenses in proportion to a city or town’s population, which means that not everyone who applies for a liquor license is able to get one, especially in Boston where all existing licenses are already accounted for. As a result, Boston-based retailers — including package stores — must sometimes wait for an owner to sell his or her license, often at an exorbitant markup that can exceed $200,000.
The new breed of licenses would aid independent Boston grocers who are currently unable to pay today’s inflated prices. But Boston package stores would still be subject to the auctioning of existing permits.
It’s hard to turn down convenience to protect the people who are bombarding us with ill-conceived attack ads and scare tactics. But if our convenience comes at the cost of independent liquor stores, who, according to a Massachusetts Package Store Association survey, derived 24 to 30 percent of total 2004 sales from wine, it will be a bitter pill to swallow for those who care about the future of small business.
