Wine sales in grocery stores?
Law ‘puritanical and antiquated’
It’s time for the Connecticut legislature to modernize a state law and allow grocery stores to sell wine. Consumers in many U.S. states already enjoy this convenience and choice while shopping for food and other necessities. It’s an overwhelmingly popular policy in those states. Meanwhile, here in the land of steady (bad) habits, consumers don’t have that option.
The barrier on grocery store wine sales dates back to the Prohibition era, when most people bought their groceries at the corner A&P and the kids’ school clothes at Woolworths. Ever since then, Connecticut package stores and their distributor network have employed skilled lobbyists to successfully protect a wine sales monopoly as if nothing has changed. The reality is that the retail landscape is exponentially more competitive today and customers’ expectations and priorities ultimately determine winners and losers. Grocery stores compete with convenience stores, drug stores, super stores, club stores, restaurants and a rapidly expanding online universe of goods and services. Not one of these other retail channels has exclusivity on the sale of any single product they sell. All of these businesses compete for customers based on their experience and satisfaction with that specific retailer. Package stores compete only with each other.
The exclusion on wine sales in grocery stores is both puritanical and antiquated. It’s now possible to buy retail recreational marijuana in Connecticut, but not a bottle of wine in a grocery store? In today’s hyper-competitive retail landscape, why is there a law protecting “liquor-only” stores at the expense of hundreds of thousands of consumers who shop in food stores weekly? The idea that grocery stores in Connecticut want the ability to sell wine is not some whimsical notion dreamed up by the state’s food retailers or our customers looking for that option. Many other states allow the sale of wine in grocery stores, and our customers have experienced it while traveling or vacationing in those other states.
Today’s consumer wants convenience and choice and those two simple concepts mean very different things to people. The most popular alcoholic beverage for American women is wine, while men in the United States prefer liquor or spirits. According to a 2019 survey, 43.2 percent of female respondents chose wine as their favorite alcoholic beverage, while 39.3 percent of male respondents chose liquor as their preferred type of alcohol. Consider that the majority of grocery store consumers are female and that the majority of package store customers are men. Sure, women visit package stores to purchase wine, but it’s not necessarily by choice. One might ask: is the current law unintentionally discriminatory towards women as it relates to their preferred shopping routines and outlets?
Opponents on the other side of this argument often say, “but we’re only allowed to sell three items.” It sounds rather innocuous, but, in fact, package stores are the only Connecticut businesses granted government protection to sell off premise wine & spirits. In reality, they also sell plenty of soft drinks, beverage mixers, tobacco products, ice, and lottery tickets too. And that’s where this unique stubbornness of an insular cooperative manifests itself: when presented the opportunity to expand their lineup of product offerings to salty snacks, cheeses and chocolates in order to offset lost wine sales, package store reps fall back on the trope, “we only want to sell beer, wine and spirits.” In other words, no thank you on the compete argument. If grocery store wine sales put a package store out of business who refused to adapt to more level playing field conditions, my sense is they weren’t going to survive anyway.
A recent public opinion poll by the STATS Group, led by well-known researcher and former UConn Professor Ken Dautrich, shows that 84% of Connecticut residents favor grocery store
wine sales. Strong support spanned every demographic measured—from female to male, from Republican to Democrat to Independent, from Black to White to Hispanic citizens. When you strip away the special interests and ask consumers, this policy is more popular than recreational marijuana, online sports gambling, and early voting.
A few months ago, in November of 2022, a majority of Colorado residents passed a referendum on wine in grocery stores when they were given the chance to weigh in. If wine sales in grocery stores was put on a ballot referendum here in Connecticut, I can say with certainty that residents would pass it overwhelmingly.