If you want to know what Rep. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, is up against in his attempt to allow grocery and convenience stores to sell full-strength beer, consider a message I received last week after merely mentioning in another column that I favored the concept.
“I own a liquor store sitting next to a King Soopers,” my correspondent said. “I have $750,000 invested in my business. I work 60 hours a week to make it run right. I employ 10 people. However my store wouldn’t last a month if the law changes and gives King Soopers a full strength license.”
The writer went on to blast me personally, an apparently irresistible tactic these days in a political joust. But in all fairness, his concern cannot be brushed aside. It’s hard to deny that at least some liquor stores would suffer loss of sales under Liston’s bill.
No wonder previous attempts to junk Colorado’s antiquated system of restricting the sale of full- strength brews have failed.
Not that Liston is moved by such arguments. “Liquor stores have been able to bang the drum of confusion and fear” for too long, the sponsor of House Bill 1284 told me, even though they’ve “done just fine” in other states where grocery stores sell beer, wine and spirits. Anyway, he added, “It’s not engraved in the Constitution that just because you’ve opened up a business that you’re guaranteed to stay in that business for the next 50 years.”
That’s true, of course, but thin gruel for business owners wondering if customers will melt away.
Maybe the transition needs to be less drastic to broaden its political appeal. Sen. Betty Boyd, a Lakewood Democrat, has offered a possible option with Senate Bill 194: Allow convenience stores (defined as retail outlets of less than 5,000 square feet) to sell full strength beer but maintain the ban for larger grocery stores.
“I personally believe (full- strength beer) sales in large venues would have a real impact on sales on liquor stores,” Boyd told me, adding that those same stores should be able to compete with convenience outlets.
Of course they should, with their broader offering of beer and continued monopoly on wine and liquor.
For me, the most curious opponent to changing the beer laws is the Colorado Brewers Guild — so I called John Bryant at Oskar Blues Brewery in Longmont to hear his industry’s case. Bryant is measured and thoughtful, admitting the proposals “will not be the end of craft beer as we know it. I’m not saying the sky is falling, but I am saying it will change the industry” — and somewhat homogenize it.
Bryant says Colorado craft beer buyers enjoy an unrivaled selection of diverse, fresh beers — satisfying every idiosyncratic taste — and he credits part of the reason to the ability of the smallest brewer to “hand sell our beers up and down the street” from one independent store to another. But that model doesn’t work as well with retail chains, with their centralized, risk-averse purchasing.
He probably has a point, but the question is whether it should outweigh the overall consumer benefits of reform. Moreover, as representatives of the convenience stores like to point out, of the states boasting the greatest number of breweries (California, Colorado, Washington and Oregon), only Colorado bars convenience stores from selling full-strength beer.
Boyd’s bill navigates a middle course in the beer wars. It won’t satisfy free-market purists like Liston or restrictionists on the other side, but it’s a step toward a saner system.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
