Wegman’s lobbying to allow wine sales in NY supermarkets
I’m assuming the most likely outcome is that nothing happens. The second most likely outcome (and even worse, IMO) is they allow sales in supermarkets but not Costco.
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Wegman’s wine department is awesome. Who wouldn’t want one?
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It depends on the store, but I have been more often unimpressed than impressed. I will concede that they generally do a good job on NY wines. However, I think the Total Wines in Westbury is as good as any Wegman’s I’ve seen, including Total’s NYS selection.
And Wegman’s is the best case scenario for NY supermarket wines, while allowing Costco to sell wine would be a game changer.
Always so interesting to observe a state ready to legalize recreational pot use, but still restricts Costco from selling wine. .
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The more outlets, the better. I don’t live near either, but Total Wine does little for me. We do like shopping at Wegman’s when they are in NY and I’d love for them to take over Mariano’s from Kroger in Chicago if the are forced sell sell as part of their Albertson’s merger
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God bless Wegman’s, but they face a huge political obstacle: NY only allows one license per owner, so we have no chains, but we have thousands of crappy mom-and-pop shops whose owners vote.
The one in Alexandria falls a bit shy of awesome, but it is vastly better than any of the competing chains. They’ve done a really nice job mixing price points and higher end products with more mid-market stuff. I was impressed
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It’s an interesting question as to how any potential bill will handle the one license per owner issue if they’re going to allow grocery stores to carry wine. Obviously this would mean that they would have to allow multiple licenses. How they craft that would be critical.
But as you say it’s unlikely anything will pass.
Kind of reminds me when they didn’t permit branch banking in Illinois. Hope you New Yorkers get over it
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How about sports betting is legal but online poker is illegal.
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That would have been a surmountable problem because the number of local banks didn’t compare to the number of mom-and-pop liquor joints.
Now, maybe if Wegman’s proposes to allow liquor stores to sell beer, they could win some of the mom-and-pop votes. At the moment, only food stores (including corner and convenience stores) can sell beer.
There you have it. Those little stores pay plenty in bribes (campaign contributions) to keep things the way they are. Maryland has much the same regulatory structure.
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I’m not sure this is the case. It’s so dependent on location. Costco in the NW Chicago suburbs was decent. In New Orleans it was awful. When I first moved to London the location I used was great but now awful as well.
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