Beer, glorious beer. So frosty* and delicious. Except on Sundays. (*Note: frostiness void where prohibited.)
Dave Bangert, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has a good column on the Rickers’ end-run around the state’s liquor laws. Rickers convenience stores found a loophole that let it sell cold beer at its locations. (Apparently selling just enough food to get a restaurant permit to allowed cold carry out.) After the exploit came to light, the House sprang into action to stop others from taking advantage — tacking a Rickers provision onto a Senate Bill. The House committee report is here. The committee report contains an “intent of the General Assembly” provision. That’s always a red-flag in Indiana legislation. The substantive provisions of the law should speak for themselves. If there is an “intent” provision, that’s an indication that the substance is weak. (The Indiana Law Blog notes that use of preambles is discouraged by Indiana’s legislative drafting manual.)
Bangert writes:
Consider Sunday sales of retail alcohol. Getting rid of Indiana’s Prohibition-throwback vestige of blue laws really should be the low-hanging piece of Indiana’s weird setup.
But there is no such thing as easy when it comes to the marriage of convenience and the sense of Indiana’s carry-out alcohol regulations. Sunday sales is a frequent fight at the Statehouse, ultimately gummed up with sympathy for true liquor stores none too keen on allowing the sales of beer, wine and whiskey a seventh day – especially when that extra day is one of the biggest for weekly grocery shopping.
. . .
Meanwhile, the General Assembly resigns itself to scolding state agencies that grant a taste of cold beer sales, no matter how closely a place such as Ricker’s followed the letter of the law to get it done. Lawmakers are left trying to explain their intent – in this case that “a restaurant within a grocery store, convenience store, specialty or gourmet food store, or drug store should not be given the privilege of selling cold beer or liquor for carryout” – while admitting they’re barely solving anything at all.
He offers a hint of optimism though, observing that – as with any struggle with alcohol – “the first step is admitting that you have a problem.”
I know it’s something of a tradition for people offering their opinions to get perspective from cab drivers. But, I haven’t been in a cab for awhile, so the best I can offer is “dudes I talked to while watching a high school baseball game.” They were generally amused and supportive of Rickers and didn’t think much of the General Assembly’s effort to tackle the situation. I think liquor laws are so jacked up, we have a celebration of the anti-hero situation going on here. I’m not sure if it’s Robin Hood or Billy the Kid or what, but ultimately we have laws that don’t make sense and, so, aren’t respected. When that happens, there tends to be admiration for someone like Rickers who gets around the arbitrary intent of the law while complying with the letter.
Still, in the scheme of things, the liquor laws are more of a low-level irritant. I don’t know that there will be a big push to make the General Assembly change things in the face of some pretty entrenched interests. As with the fable of the Hound and the Hare, the public is only running for its dinner while the liquor stores are running for their lives. I’m skeptical Indiana’s liquor law structure will change much. Probably it will just serve to be a drag on the General Assembly’s reputation (a phrase which, I recognize, makes for some easy jokes.)
The solutions are simple – vote out the legislators who support this nonsense, and refuse to support your local liquor store. Nothing motivates legislators faster than the threat of losing their jobs.
I recall how quickly the property tax situation was “fixed” when Bart Peterson got voted out a decade or so ago. Of course, the fix had/has its own issues too numerous to mention… so on second thought, perhaps a better solution would just be to copy the laws from any other state. Or maybe CPAC has some boilerplate alcohol laws… that’s another popular Indiana solution to “problems”…
> liquor stores are restricted to 10 types of goods,
it seems to me that the obvious compomise on sunday sales would be to allow liquor stores to sell more types of merchandise. if you go to a liquor store in chicago, alcohol often takes up only a third or half of the store, with the rest being chips and snacks and such.
See, that would make “sense”. And it scares the heck out of the liquor stores, who’d have to improve to compete. It’s cheaper and easier to throw a few bucks at the Legislature and keep their sweet government-allowed competitive advantage.
This is nothing new. According to the “Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly, 1816-1978” the 1945 General Assembly prohibited any patron standing at a bar, and women could not be seated at a bar, then “In the 1950’s the ABC allowed women to sit at ‘piano bars’ as long as drinks were poured at the ‘regular bar.’ … Women were also forbidden to tend bar until Lake County tavern owners discovered that by ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Commission] definition a bar was not a bar unless its counter was a certain specified number of inches above the floor. The owners lowered their bars and women began to pour drinks.” p.458
Sounds familiar. My folks were regular patrons at a Richmond bar & restaurant called Connie’s. Seems like there were swinging doors (or a spot where swinging doors used to be — the details are fuzzy for me), and I think Mom told me it had something to do with allowing women to be there.
There are lots of small town Indiana dining establishments that have seperate restaurant and lounge entrances and didn’t have a door between two sides.
You don’t have to sell much food to get a retail food permit. To get a retail food permit a for-profit business would have to sell potentially hazardous foods, i.e., foods that need to be kept under temperature control. Selling milk, ice cream bars, or eggs would suffice.
Is Ricker’s actually operating a restaurant? Or, are they simply selling just enough packaged potentially hazardous food to get a retail food permit? There is no separate food code and no separate food permit for restaurants and grocery stores anymore. As far as I know, both types of establishments operate under the same food code statewide and have done so for close to 20 years.