K & L Wines to Connecticut...NOT

Anyone know why K & L won’t ship to Connecticut now that it’s legal? Is it as simple as they don’t want to do “the paperwork”?
I’ve tried asking their customer service, but I get non-answers, wrong\incomplete answers (“We legally can’t”) etc.

I know they have limited shipping to other states over the years. Each state I would imagine requires paper work and taxes are different. You can always inquire with them but I know they stopped shipping to MN a while ago.

They won’t ship to Maine either, which is also legal. It should now be legal to ship to every state (but I realize there could be expensive complications). I don’t know why a retailer with such a large internet presence would be limiting themselves so much. It seems like they got some cease-and-desists years ago before some of the laws changed and never bothered to keep up on what can now be done legally.

Although retail shipping to Virginia is legal I think the problem maybe is that it is not legal for retailers to ship to CA. Just a guess. The VA law requires reciprocity. Either that or the other states require a license that K&L does not want to bother with.

Connecticut demands a $5K bond deposit on top of pretty steep yearly costs. I would think for K&L that wouldn’t be a huge problem, but I know it is for many smaller producers. That’s why I’m not licensed there.

Anyone have any experience with them shipping to PA or MD? says no on their site but thought I’d ask.

Rob,

I live just over the state line near the southwest corner. You can ship to me in NY and then come pick up your wine.

Yes, K&L stopped shipping wine to Colorado too, saying repeatedly that it is illegal, even though I know of a dozen or more retailers in CA who still happily ship to CO.

Dan: Incredibly generous offer, thanks. I’m outside Hartford though and the stuff I’m buying won’t justify the inconvenience to you or the drive for me.

Pardon me if this is a dumb question, but when did it become legal to ship to every state?

It is legal to almost all states if you use a local licensee to run the shipment through their book$. The networks have been set up for years by savvy shippers.
If you cannot find a third party shipper for must have purchases, I have one for you, but you would have to ship it first to them about 60 miles away. Probably an additional $35-$40- per case, email me.

It is not legal to ship to every state.

I also wonder if K&L has different licensure issues in that it sells booze as well as wine, when all of the other CA retailers who still ship to CO only sell wine.

There are still state laws against it, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Tennessee case should mean those laws are unconstitutional (thus why I said it should be rather than it is, although I could have been more clear). Maybe one of our resident experts in this area of law could weigh in. I do know that since the ruling, at least one very large and high profile retailer has been shipping to every state, or at least they were the last time I checked. Others have flaunted the laws all along, while others have semi-flaunted the laws with third party shippers.

In any case, unless they have been somehow banned from doing so, K&L could get a license to ship to Maine, according to Maine state law. Yet they don’t.

There are 5 states you can not ship to. I know Alabama and Utah are two of them. Delaware might be another. And there are one or two more in the south.

In previous threads, some people have noted K&L is willing to work with customers who arrange their own third party shipping.

My guess is they’re already maxed out with their four locations. It was quite awhile ago, but they changed policy and dropped a bunch of states they used to ship to. It may not just be the fees and legal hassles and exposure, but also would require expansion costs. Why bother trying to compete in states on the other side of the country, when there’s a high break-even point, low upside and ever-changing legalities to keep up with and so forth?

Btw, on the winery side, at least, and I’m way out of date, but the Wine Institute’s faux pro-shipping template that included that base $5k permit and all sorts of hassles, also had a sales cap. Yes, massive penalties for selling too much in a state. Don’t know, but I’d expect that was the same for retailers, and there wouldn’t be much reason for that to have changed. I remember the cap being pretty low. Imagine all that hassles to surpass and make the effort of shipping to a state worthwhile, and then having a sales cap about double your break-even point. And then, if you are doing well in such a state, having to tell your regular customers there you can’t sell to them for the rest of the year. Then you’d have a bunch of upset people posting nasty things about you all over the internet, and a set of customers in that state who’ve moved on to other retailers. The next year you’d have the same struggle to market to enough customers to surpass that break-even point and make the effort worthwhile. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Wasn’t Florida on that list?

According to the Wine Institute (although I can’t speak for how current the info is) there are 7 states that prohibit direct-to-consumer shipping from wine producers. Here’s a link Direct-To-Consumer Shipping Laws for Wineries – Wine Institute Note that this is for producers and does not reflect the situation for retailers. Many of the states that allow direct shipments from producers prohibit shipments from retailers.

Florida is fine now.

Thanks for explaining all of this. From what I can tell, it’s $310 for the initial application and then $110/year after that. The limit is 12 cases per address per year so I really don’t see that being an issue. I would think that $110/year would pay for itself just off of people I know, but I do understand that there’s more money to be made selling locally. I appreciate the context. The limitations of their physical locations and how much staff can reasonably be in there picking orders, plus space for staging those orders before they ship out, could be the reason. I remember seeing Wine Library, back in the WLTV days, having boxes stacked throughout every possible hallway everywhere other than the sales floor. I imagine fire codes come into play at some point. Shippers are big. It still seems strange to me (I would think these problems are solvable), but I really don’t know what they’ve tried and what challenges they’ve come up against. Alcohol laws have a tendency to make things difficult, as everyone who has ever been ITB knows.