It’s too little, too late and frankly insulting. The foreign-owned brewers who own Ontario Beer Stores have seen the writing on the wall and think they can negotiate out of the mess of their own making.
The beer giants have offered to sell a position in a few beer stores to local craft brewers. They think this can get them out of the barrage of criticism that has been directed at their antiquated, inadequate and deplorable beer monopoly. Too bad, so sad, it’s not going to do them any good.
The Beer Store barons need better public relations. And they should have started it years ago. This writer came to Barrie ten years ago and started complaining then about the beer stores in this town. They are disgusting. The complaints were brushed off. They ignored our very reasonable and rational concerns about their stores. They just never realized how many people at Queen’s Park might read this blog.
Sure the Toronto Star has greater circulation, higher priced writers and concentrated on the filthy foreign ownership instead of the filthy floors in the stores. It is the people who have to use the stores that the politicians need to heed. This monopoly is abusive and stupid. They should have gone to the Ontario government years ago and offered to distribute beer to approved, qualified convenience stores. That would have been smart, progressive and good public relations. Even Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 loved you.
Convenience stores hardly have the room for kegs and two-fours. The current beer stores could adequately handle recycling, and the bigger boxes. And with adequate walls between recycling and beer, the stores would have a chance to do proper merchandising.
But as it stands now, Ontario’s superbly stupid politicians have sicced a banker by the name of Ed Clark on them to stick them up for some form of franchise fee. Clark is no threat to the foreign-owned brewers but whatever Clark thinks he is going to pull off is just going to be paid by the voters who are not going to like it.
What Ontario desperately needs is some common sense management of this beer market mess along with privatizing the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. (No, they are not separate problems.) One of these days, they will smarten up, we hope.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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