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Question 1 - Opinions
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COMMENTARY Voting yes will offer fairness and choice
On Nov. 7, voters will have the opportunity to end the 72-year-old law that forces Massachusetts consumers into liquor stores whenever they wish to purchase a bottle of wine. Question 1 will create a wine-only license for grocery stores and will give local communities total control over granting the new licenses. Question 1 will benefit consumers by saving them time and money. Studies show that the current anti-competitive wine-sales structure in Massachusetts costs consumers between $26 million and $36 million each year. Most other states already allow shoppers to buy wine in grocery stores, and it’s time Massachusetts joined the list. Our citizens deserve the same options as citizens of other states. Question 1 opponents - the liquor lobby and the big chain liquor stores - are pouring millions of dollars into a scare campaign. The truth is, the liquor lobby is scared of losing the virtual monopoly it has enjoyed for 72 years. Liquor stores don’t want you, the consumer, to be able to purchase a bottle of wine along with your groceries. They want you to keep doing what you’ve always had to do - make a separate trip to a liquor store, which burns up gas, time and money. In addition to forcing Massachusetts residents into liquor stores, the liquor lobby is also peddling misinformation about Question 1. They say that wine sales in grocery stores will increase underage drinking and will drive liquor stores out of business. They say that gas stations will be able to sell wine. Don’t believe it. The 34 states that allow wine sales in grocery stores have as good or better records of enforcing underage drinking laws as Massachusetts. In fact, records from the Massachusetts Alcohol Beverages Control Commission show that liquor stores are far more likely to sell alcohol to minors than grocery stores. Question 1 contains specific language about which businesses are eligible for the new wine licenses. Gas stations do not qualify. Most convenience stores will not qualify. Businesses that do apply will have to be approved by local licensing boards. While the liquor lobby seems to doubt the intelligence of local officials, Question 1 supporters believe that local officials have the knowledge and common sense to determine which establishments are grocery stores and which aren’t. In all the other states that allow wine sales in grocery stores, package stores remain in business and their sales are steady. There is no evidence of any negative impact on small businesses. Consider this: Massachusetts grocery stores have bank branches and florist shops now, and banks and florists haven’t gone out of business. It’s common sense that when teens decide to drink, they don’t drink wine. It’s also a confirmed fact. A recent Columbia University study found that underage drinkers consumed 71.5 percent beer, 20.8 percent liquor, and only 7.7 percent wine. The study also showed that wine represented a mere 2.9 percent of consumption among underage problem drinkers. So none of their scare arguments stand up to reality. Then why does the big liquor lobby keep trying to scare voters away from Question 1? Because they don’t want the competition. They have enjoyed a virtual monopoly for 72 years, and they’ll stop at nothing to preserve it. They have spread their money carefully, making millions and millions in political donations. Unsurprisingly, some elected officials are putting the liquor lobby’s interests ahead of the interests of their own constituents. These elected officials are echoing the false public safety arguments of the liquor lobby. They are more concerned with taking care of their big contributors than taking care of their constituents. Question 1 makes sense for Massachusetts consumers. Poll after poll shows that consumers want to be able to purchase wine with their groceries. They want the same choices enjoyed by consumers in most other states. They want to save gas, time and money. They don’t want their common sense insulted by a fact-challenged scare campaign. On Nov. 7, vote for fair competition and consumer choice. Vote Yes on Question 1. Christopher P. Flynn is chairman of Yes on 1: Grocery Stores and Consumers for Fair Competition and president of the Massachusetts Food Association. |
COMMENTARY Expanding wine sales could cause headachesFor The Patriot Ledger / Oct. 28, 2006 Last month, the owner of a package store in Marshfield was thrust into the news just for doing his job. Confronted with a customer attempting to buy liquor who seemed to be intoxicated, Keith Whitaker refused to make the sale and then called police, who stopped the man driving near an elementary school and arrested him for the 15th time on drunken driving charges. Despite Robert Scheller’s history as a recidivist - his list of offenses is so long some predate modern record-keeping - he somehow managed to legally renew his driver’s license every year. Armed only with his experience, powers of observation and a telephone, Whitaker was able to do what our system had failed for more than a decade to do: get a dangerous repeat offender off our roads. I thought about Keith Whitaker and package store owners like him when I saw an ad for the campaign to allow grocery and convenience stores to sell alcohol. It’s all a matter of convenience, say the proponents - mostly giant grocery chains that want to boost their profits through the sale of booze - and their customers are demanding the option of one-stop shopping. Spokespeople for the grocery chains like to avoid those voices of concern that say doubling the number of liquor licenses in Massachusetts could create a public safety problem, or that teens may find it a lot easier to buy alcohol from grocery and convenience stores. Without a hint of irony, this handful of corporate giants who control most of the world’s retail food business seek to cast their opposition in Massachusetts as monopolists with unfair market advantages. Kim Hinden, spokesperson for the large grocery store chains and former Massachusetts registrar of motor vehicles, says the public needn’t worry about underage sales of liquor at grocery and convenience stores. “There is no correlation between underage drinking and selling wine in grocery stores,” Hinden told the Lynn Daily Item. “And that is based on evidence in the 34 states where it’s allowed.” The fact is that the number of drunken-driving fatalities in those 34 states that allow grocery and convenience store sales of alcohol is far higher than the drunken driving fatality rate in Massachusetts - which currently ranks among the lowest in the country. Moreover, there are ample studies that show package stores do a far better job at policing and protecting against illegal sales or sales to already intoxicated people, than do grocery chains and convenience stores. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that the small, specialized niche outlets do a better job policing themselves than do the huge, multiproduct grocery or convenience store chains. On a practical basis, getting caught selling to minors could put the small package store owner out of business. For the multinational grocery and convenience store chains, meanwhile, the transgression and punishment becomes a cost of doing business, the way some large box stores treat the state’s unit pricing laws: Ignore them and just pay the fine. It’s easy in our cynical culture to look at the package store system that segregates liquor from most other retail outlets and conclude that it exists to benefit a special interest or an influential group. It’s true that the system in part was designed to help small-business owners compete on a relatively level playing field with giant discounters. But the real motivation of the laws was to try to keep alcohol out of places where young people shop and congregate. There’s generally no reason for an underage person to visit a package store other than to try to illegally purchase its products. Thus the stores themselves become a deterrent. Not so for grocery stores and convenience stores, where booze would be just one more item along with Power Bars and salad dressing. Have you visited your local 7-Eleven or Store 24 recently? The parking lots and sidewalks around the ones in my town are nearly always crowded with youngsters hanging out on weekend nights. There’s a reason that more than two dozen police chiefs across the commonwealth have come out against Question 1. It comes with no requirements for increasing the alcohol-related enforcement or training at the outlets that will vie for the 2,800 new liquor licenses up for grabs if it passes. More and more, we will have to rely on the efforts of people like Keith Whitaker to help keep the drunk drivers off our roads. State Representative Garrett Bradley represents Hingham, Hull and Cohasset.
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