Easy purchase of wine soon over
Grocery stores face strict clamp down after court ruling
BUYING wine at your local grocery store in the Eastern Cape will no longer be an option after the Constitutional Court yesterday refused to confirm a Grahamstown High Court decision to strike down certain sections of the provincial Liquor Act.
The high court in December last year struck down as unconstitutional and invalid that section of the 2003 Eastern Cape Liquor Act that specified that so-called grocer’s wine licences would automatically expire in 2014, a decade after the act was passed.
The act stipulated that holders of grocer’s liquor licences could, after 2014, instead apply to convert these licences to a licence to sell liquor on separate premises.
Shoprite Checkers, which holds 28 so-called “grocer’s wine licences” in the Eastern Cape, brought an urgent application to challenge this section of the act. It said there were not enough nearby premises to allow them to open the same number of stand-alone liquor outlets. It said if shoppers lost the convenience of shopping for wine as part of their regular grocery shopping excursions, it would lose some R40-million in sales per year. This would result in job losses as well as an annual loss of some R2-million in VAT revenue for the state.
It argued that no other province has provided for automatic lapsing of grocer’s wine licences.
Shoprite contended that a grocer’s liquor licence was property and to take that licence away in this manner amounted to an unjustifiable, arbitrary and unconstitutional deprivation of property.
Grahamstown High Court Judge John Smith ruled in favour of Shoprite Checkers. He said licences, permits and quotas with commercial value issued by administrative functionaries should be considered as “property” for the purposes of constitutional protection.
He ruled in December last year that pending the Concourt’s confirmation or otherwise of his decision, Shoprite Checkers could, in the meantime, continue to sell wine from its approved premises. Most supermarkets with licences have subsequently continued to sell wine from their main store premises.
But the Concourt yesterday found otherwise. In the main judgment penned by Judge Johan Froneman, it found that although a grocer’s wine licence was property as envisaged by the constitution, it held that the change envisaged by the act for simplification in the licensing system was rational.
It said the declaration of constitutional invalidity should not be confirmed as there was no arbitrary deprivation of property.
The bottom line for shoppers is that the decade-long convenience of being able to buy wine with groceries is now a thing of the past.
According to court papers the Eastern Cape is the only province where this change has been imposed. Shoprite Checkers had not commented at the time of writing.