Wine With Dinner
Would you like to buy wine at the grocery store? So would a lot of people. Minnesota is awfully hinky tight with it’s liquor laws (as much as you can be without dry counties, I guess). I think we could stand to loosen up a little.
Without even going into the economics of it, I don’t buy the liquor store owners argument that they’re saving underage kids from alcohol because they’d be able to buy it in droves at the grocery store. Liquor store owners don’t give a shit. They just care that they don’t get caught selling. So what if a grocery store did get caught selling to underage kids? That’s the grocery stores problem, not the liquor store’s.
Plus, grocery stores are often open 24 hours. Which means you can buy 24 hours (hopefully). How many times have you been caught without suds because you failed to plan your purchase a day in advance or you didn’t anticipate that you’d run out?
Biz Journal is polling so if you feel compelled to chime in somewhere other than with your state legislator, go there.
I realize with everything else going on in the world that the right to buy wine at the grocery store is probably not a huge priority. But this seems like an easy enough situation to fix. Start small, ya know? So this way it’s that much easier for us to drown our sorrows while folks are dying in Iraq.
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That is a bs reason… the real reason they are opposed is because it will cut into their sales and their margins, basically upsetting their very profitable monopoly.
Also, even if something like this passes, I bet they’ll still have restrictions on what times it can be sold, it won’t be a 24 hour free-for-all.
I wish they’d add beer to this. There’s no good reason why they don’t sell it in grocery stores…
Grocery stores sell beer; why can’t they sell wine, too? Heck, I would think kids and beer have more in common than kids and wine, so why aren’t kids running wild in the beer aisle of your neighborhood Cub? At least that was the case when I was an underage drinker many, many moons ago. And don’t give me grief about it being 3.2 beer for sale at Cub, etc. Your domestic, nationally-distributed and best-selling “strong” beers, e.g. Miller Genuine Draft Lite and Bud Lite, are not much over a 4 on the scale of alcohol-by-volume.
I liked the reason the Richfield Liquor store gave me for being closed on Sunday. “We need a day off too.”
Don’t you want to make money?! I bet if the store owner was there they’d be all gung-ho for another day of sales.
MN is about as ass backwards as it can get on liquor laws without giving us dry counties.
Yeah, I don’t really have much help for the 24-hour thing, either.
Coming from Michigan, where you can buy liquor pretty much anywhere at any time, I was totally surprised that you couldn’t buy wine at the grocery store here.
I’ve always found MN’s somewhat puritanical liquor laws a bit of an anachronism. Living in Moorhead we would just cross over to Fargo to buy booze after it was too late in Minnesota. I would think that the loss of revenue would be substantial enough to loosen the laws a little. Of course on a national scale I’m also a bit perplexed by the fact that a person has a right to vote at the age of 18 but to legally consume alcohol one has to be 21. I don’t know of any reason why this should still be the case other than it being one more instance of socially prolonging childhood.