Katherine Mangu-Ward explores the differences between free-market stores and state-run stores:
Ask an immigrant to tell you about her first impressions of America — especially someone who hails from a communist or socialist state — and eventually she’ll get to the part about the grocery store. After a lifetime of empty shelves, poor selection, and unreliable hours, the cornucopia of an American Safeway or Kroger is a revelation. The colors, the music, the lights, the people! Massive stores crammed to the gills with three-dozen brands of cereal and 17 kinds of frozen potato products seem like something out of a dream.This is how I felt the first time I bought booze outside my home state of Virginia.
Yes, Virginia is finally considering a switch away from state-run liquor stores and toward simple “sin” taxes:
Growing up in Virginia, the only liquor store I knew was the ABC “package store” in the local Bradlee Shopping Center. The linoleum was dingy, the adjustable industrial shelving a grimy grayish off-white. Unlike every other store on the strip there was no music, just the hum of the florescent lighting and the consumptive coughs of the other patrons. The clerks wore smocks over their clothes, a practice that had been abandoned by virtually all other retail establishments by my 1980s childhood. Every shelf was tidy and completely full of liquor — no problem there — but the selection was abysmal, with rows and rows of identical bottles lining the walls.There was a Giant grocery store next door — a convenient place for revelations about the glories of the capitalist system — and a wine shop a few doors down. But neither of them sold booze. Only the state-owned, state-run ABC was authorized to vend hooch.
Virginia is one of 18 states where the government is the monopoly rumrunner. Supermarkets, gourmet shops, and corner stores are all forbidden to sell liquor. But Bob McDonnell, the newly-elected Republican governor, has promised to end the monopoly on liquor sales in the Old Dominion.
This bold gesture isn’t because McDonnell is an especially thoroughgoing libertarian; there are plenty of other areas where he’d like to see more state involvement in the private lives of citizens, not less. This isn’t a 12-step program to help the commonwealth go cold turkey on alcohol money either. McDonnell has no intention of letting Virginia’s bottle-based income fall below its current levels of more than $100 million a year. In fact, part of the reason McDonnell is considering privatization at all is that he is looking for cash to spend on transportation infrastructure. He predicts that selling off the state’s 334 liquor stores to private players and gathering licensing fees from more private sellers will bring in $500 million in the short run, while leaving long-run income intact.