Are all Ontario LCBO Stores Equally as Bad?

Visiting Niargra /Beamsville/Kitchener–Waterloo and thought we would be able to get wine and liquor up here. Wow these LCBO stores are awful. What do you do? I thought we had it bad in Ohio.

You have to go to the Vintages section and there are many that are better than others. But yes, it’s terrible and there’s a reason they call it the KGBO.

Visiting Toronto as well, with similar impressions. Try Eataly

Smaller stores have pretty bad selection. If it’s in the regular part of the LCBO store, its typically produced to a level where they can fill all the stores with bottles year round. If it’s in the vintages section, they’re typically smaller bottlings of a recent vintage that get released randomly throughout the year and then vanish until next year.

There are a few good stores in Toronto/Ottawa that get better products, but generally if you want any of the top end producers they only get released online via Classics Collection releases, special offer releases or allocated (lottery system) special offers (think drc / rousseau).

And beyond all of that, prices are an absolute scam for any mid-range stuff that is readily available worldwide.

Anything you buy in Ontario comes from the LCBO. Anything at Eataly was bought / imported through the LCBO, no way around it. Even buying direct from the importer, it goes through the LCBO.

It’s awful. All the best product goes to 5 stores in the province and if you don’t live there, well get fucked, I guess.

Boy, I’m glad my late father emigrated from Hamilton to sunny Los Angeles as a boy in the 1930s!

That must stink.

The KGBO is mainly aimed at the mass market and they do a fair job at that, at least in larger stores. If you want a dozen flavours of Hendricks you’re in luck.

The Vintages program has had a considerable dumbing down over the last few years. There are still isolated exceptions that show up, either regularly or as one offs eg Vina Tondonia or Louis Michel Chablis. If you like $30 (CA) Shiraz you’re in luck, otherwise it’s a crap shoot.

Another nasty innovation is that for a lot of wines they don’t bother to note the vintage, or if they do they happily substitute , and still keep the same SKU (they have a “Vintages Essentials” program of wines that will be in every store that has problem in spades).

And their distribution and computer systems are a mess. (They have three different ways of ordering online to pick up in store with different email addresses for Invoices and there are two different desks in store depending on how you order).

Example: Grande Marnier Cuvée Alexandre is out of stock at several nearby stores but an outlying store has 114 bottles!! In the before times that wouldn’t matter as you could do an “in store transfer” (their term for an inter-store transfer, go figure) which was an excellent service but they used COVID as an excuse to shut that down.

One of their goals is to support local wine makers but in practice this means favouring the large producers at the expense of smaller craft wine makers. Requirements for minimum turnover and to buy advertising in their flyers are quite discouraging.

The “Classics” program - monthly online lottery where the serious stuff is supposed to be - has been plagued by supply issues. Typically half the promised wines are no shoes, supplemented by a last minut bonus offering of latecomers from previous releases. Shipping is a mess, we all know, but there is a lingering suspicion they are partly at fault too.

Basically this is what happens when you have “retailers” rather than wine people in charge.

Jogging back to their primary goal I’d have to say they do a fair job. But they suck at the serious wine & spirit business. There is continual talk of privatisation and whatever you might think of the idea generally* I’d say that the serious wine part should certainly be privatised - that is the only way to get the diversity and specialist retailers that segment needs.

On top of all this we have the extortionate tax and duty regime. I look on that as proof of how much we all live living here that we suffer that burden.

• this post is too long but in brief, if the KGBO did not exist there would be no earthly reason to invent it. But it does and is a considerable revenue earner for the government. It is quite easy to f**k up a privatisation, giving away the store , literally in this case, favouring cronies etc; and I would not trust this government to have a transparent process that gets full value for the province. So I’m against it, at this time, by this government. I still want to see proper “wine merchants” though!

The in-store transfer program mitigated that to a some extent but they shut that down.

Yes indeed, I was talking to an agent yesterday who filled me in on the economics. Pricing notwithstanding it’s nice that Eataly offers a middle ground between current vintage Guigal Turque for $550 and Jadot Beaujolais for $20

Typically privatizations are done to make some key essential service/product provider that is a natural monopoly by its nature (airports, sewers, postal, flag carriers etc.) more efficient and stop further draining government coffers. There just doesn’t seem to be any structural reason why in a modern world something as prosaic as specialty retail needs to be a government run enterprise. Many more compelling reasons why fuel stations or pharmacies ought to be run by sovereigns than booze sales…

With Covid, it has been a while since I have been in Toronto but when I last went the Summerhill LCBO had a large selecion and a great vintgages section.

That is one of the favored (by the KGB O) stores, although I find it sometimes understaffed and/or the staff can get lost in there.

FIFY

As is said, no earthly reason to invent it if it did not exist; I just wouldnt trust Ford to get a good deal for the province, either financially or in terms of the resulting service level for consumers. But I should stop there as we are veering into politics. I think we agree at least 50%

Not that I have any input into this, but I think the core issue is that its a monopoly. Get rid of that aspect, open up the system to diverse ways of meeting citizenry demand for wine/beer/spirits, and see what happens.

That may mean that less money is collected in any prospective privatization, but that’s no different than when the US auctions off wireless spectrum. If a high price is extracted on the front end, it will have to be paid for ultimately by the consumers…

I think the trouble starts when you privatise a heavily regulated industry. Barriers to entry, regulatory overhead giving disproportionate economies of scale and so on. I don’t see liquor distribution or retail being unregulated in North America. The Rechabites are never far away.

Eataly can’t sell much in the way of wine in Ontario. The Summerhill LCBO about a mile north of Eataly is top three of the province’s best liquor stores. The other in Toronto is at the head office on Harbourfront / Lakeshore.

PA has similar problems. One barrier to privatization is the rural politicians think the selection would decline and prices rise in private stores in rural locations. Not to say the selection is good now.

I only go there for Havana Club 7 year old. I do fine

… at a significant markup over what the import agency representing the wineries charge. You may as well just purchase from the agent and have the wine delivered to your home.

FYI the four favored nations stores mentioned by Richard are/were the Oakville flagship store, Summerhill flagship store, Queen’s Quay flagship store at the Harbourfront near the LCBO head office and the Bayview flagship store.

The Bayview store was located inside the Bayview Village shopping mall in the northern party of the city and was downsized to a regular store as they are building condos and attaching them to a remodeled and renovated mall. That made sense given the plans to build up the mall into part of a condo/mall complex. I got the shock of my life last month when I went to visit the Queen’s Quay flagship store and discovered they had closed it down and moved the store down the street to a regular sized store. Of the three flagship stores that were easily accessible in Toronto proper, only the Summerhill store remains. Boy does this tick me off to no end.

As for the American visitors on this board going through shock upon visiting the LCBO, imagine my first time visiting a Premier wine store in New York and seeing a Costco style layout with about 5 times the selection and all of it premier selections of wine. We’re lucky if we see a single J.J. Prum Spatlese or Auslese up here every 5 years and there’s literally racks of them at Premier. My jaw was just dropping. Okay, sure, they were rather non-descript wire racks and the store didn’t have the gleaming steel, glass and oak and walnut wooden shelves the LCBO does. Could not have cared less. I don’t go to a wine and liquor store to admire the surroundings, I go for the best selection possible.

Just before the Wuhan lab caused pandemic hit us all, the LCBO got a new president who decided that the LCBO should offer substantially LESS SKUs of wine and spirits. Because as we all know, less choice is always appreciated by the selective consumer. Needless to say, I’ve been very unhappy with them the last few years.