Liquor laws
Booze in grocery stores? No thanks, say retailers.
There is little thirst among major players in Alberta’s liquor-retailing industry to follow other provinces by allowing booze sales in grocery stores.
The Liquor Control Board of Ontario on Tuesday asked large food retailers to submit proposals for housing one of 10 LCBO Express outlets inside their stores. The outlets — about 2,000 square feet compared with 15,000 in a regular government-run LCBO store — will be located in grocery stores that don’t have a nearby liquor store. And British Columbia announced in March that the province will allow grocery stores to sell hard alcohol and beer inside grocery stores using a “store-within-a-store model” that would require a separate checkout.
The significance of both moves was downplayed by industry participants in Alberta, which privatized liquor retailing in 1993. Grocery stores here cannot sell liquor in their main stores, but can sell it in a separate building nearby.
“They’re just trying to attempt to copy what we have here, only unsuccessfully in my view,” said Ivonne Martinez, president of the Alberta Liquor Store Association.
She had reservations about the Ontario model, which calls for smaller-format stores inside supermarkets.
“You’re probably just going to have just a handful of products available, so I don’t know how that benefits consumers in terms of the many products that they probably could get for example here in Alberta, where we have over 32,000 products.”
Martinez called B.C.’s public and private model complicated and convoluted and questioned the philosophy of selling booze under the same roof as food. “How are they going to manage having children not have access to alcohol when everyone can go into a grocery store?”
Jody Korchinski, director of communications for the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission, said there are no plans to change Alberta’s liquor-retailing model to allow sales inside grocery stores.
“We have Canada’s only fully privatized liquor-retailing system and one of the tenets of privatization was to encourage opportunities for small businesses. Grocery stores are certainly welcome to open liquor stores, but to ensure a fair playing field they have to be separate and apart from their grocery operations.”
She said the model has resulted in 1,300 liquor stores operating in Alberta, up from 200 government-run outlets in 1993.
Representatives of grocery chains Sobeys and Loblaw did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but two major Alberta liquor retailers were vocal about opposing liquor sales inside grocery stores.
“Alberta has a very good model, ”said Patrick de Grace, chief financial officer for Liquor Stores N.A. Ltd. “I think it’s fair to everybody. It’s fair to the grocers, it’s fair to independents, it’s fair to guys like us. Everybody pays the same price for a bottle, there’s no cross-promotion allowed on products. You can’t use liquor as a loss leader to drive your grocery business.”
Rocky Mountain Liquor CEO Peter Byrne said Ontario’s situation is different from Alberta, which offered entrepreneurs the chance to invest in the business.
“It would be a great breach of trust for the government to say, ‘We understand that you invested all this money and we have all these families dependent on it but now we’re going to change the rules.’”