The push for Sunday alcohol sales in Indiana continues. The Journal & Courier has an editorial that supports the measure, urging fairness by lifting restrictions on package liquor stores in selling other merchandise at the same time the General Assembly lifts restrictions on selling cold beer at big box stores. They also think any measure should be delayed long enough to give small package stores time to adjust their business models.
It’s not rocket science; the adoption of Sunday liquor sales in big-box facilities without giving liquor stores the same allowance is just another nail in the coffin of small business.
This whole “save small businesses” idea by prohibiting alcohol sales on Sundays is ridiculous. Why does Illinois (which allows alcohol sales on Sundays) have small business liquor stores? Why do we here in Indiana only do this protectionism when it comes to selling cars and alcohol? The prohibition against Sunday alcohol sales has nothing to do with helping small businesses.
If you need a law passed to keep your business open, you need to re-examine your business practices.
Classic example of the public being fed enough bullshit that it eventually swallows it.
Let’s begin, Jason, by noting that if you have a liquor store license there is essentially (meaning actually) a list of things which you are allowed to sell. Alcoholic beverages and related accoutrements. Tobacco. Magazines. That’s it. I can’t pass down the aisle of my local Kroger without stopping so someone coming the other way can get past the free-standing display of socks; there’s an entire two-aisle section devoted to seasonally-rotating Holiday Blow-up Lawn Displays. In short, the Big Boxes (all based out of state) can use floor space to sell whatever junk they imagine makes the best profit. The local liquor store owner, who must by law reside in state, has no such right currently.
It’s just remarkable to me how “stupid Sunday sales ban” has combined with a particularly myopic notion of “economic freedom” to reward yet another Wal*Martization of the economic landscape at the expense of local businesses, especially considering that we got here only after a carefully orchestrated, step-by-step buy-off of the General Assembly over the past twenty years. (The model being the “economic freedom” granted Coors to restrict its distribution.)
Of course the legislature has kept one species of Big Box out of the state: the Big Box liquor wholesalers who might compete with the 800 lb state-licensed liquor distributor and political campaign spigot, National Wine & Spirits.
The grocery store model is high volume/ low markup. Once this takeover is complete you’re going to see a real reduction in the number of items available, as they and National decide what is and isn’t worth bothering with. If they can’t move a container of it they won’t be interested. And when that happens you, the consumer looking for a specialty or connoisseur item, are going to be SOL, because, somehow, the right of the Demand side has never figured in this march to Freedom: you cannot legally order an item not available in Indiana, without going to the source in person first.
Doughouse,
I don’t shop at Walmart. I go to local liquor stores and local grocery stores.
I also don’t understand the whole limit on what a liquor store can sell. I find it as equally offensive as banning sales on one certain day of the week.
While we’re at it, let’s also dismantle the whole 3-part system where the brewers MUST sell to the distributors, and the stores may ONLY buy from the distributors.
Your argument seems to be that since the system is complex and corrupt, we shouldn’t try to dismantle it. Instead, we should keep in place one stupid law to counteract the unintended side effects to another stupid law.
My point is that each time one of these silly laws is up for debate, we should get rid of it and eventually end up with a simpler system.
I think Doghouse has a point, but I don’t come to the same conclusion from it.
Most of us consumers of Indiana don’t like the restrictions we notice, such as the Sunday sales prohibition. If more people realized that liquor stores (and distributers and wholesalers) had all of these restrictions on how to run their business, we’d probably be against those too. But for restrictions we don’t see/encounter, it is a bit of “out of sight, out of mind.”
I guess question I don’t know that answer to is if other states that allow alcohol sales on Sunday have the same restrictions on what liquor stores can sell.
I can say from personal experience that the stores in states with Sunday sales that I have visited seem to sell the same things as the ones in Indiana. Same selection, and I didn’t have to go to a big box to buy it.
I’d like to understand what is different in those states before I support some artificial sales restriction.
In my experience from moving from Illinois to Indiana it makes no sense to me that Indiana doesn’t allow packages liquor to be bought on Sunday. Sunday is a day where more people get together to watch football and have parties. This law takes money away from the business owner, not to mention a day lost of work from people that work at these facitlites. Lastly does Indiana think of the tax money they are loosing on Sunday? My final thought is why is ok for people to go out to taverns on Sunday and drink. Wouldn’t the sale of packaged liquor keep more people at home drinking than on the road?