According to the Ontario government your choices of booze, beer and wine are now at your finger tips. “We deliver” we are told. It all seems to be designed to sell more booze in a faux atmosphere of responsibility and restriction. What is annoying though is that it is all designed to add to the government’s coffers and forget convenience for the consumer.
That is unless you want to pay Canada Post to deliver your booze. And all they want is a 24 per cent surcharge (plus 13 per cent tax) on a $50 order.
To add insult to injury in their booze machinations, the Wynne Liberals have brought in a heavy hitter in retailing to take over as chair of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). A lot of people will be timing former Hudson’s Bay Vice-Chair Bonnie Brooks in the job. She will soon find that what the LCBO needs is better merchandising, smarter pricing and recognition that the customers are not all wine aficionados or gourmet cooks.
But as much as she might like to get her teeth into the merchandising problems, she will find the chair’s role is political. Protecting her back is her only hope of survival.
She is joining a bureaucratic and calcified organization that has not had a good merchandising idea since 1967. It has been noted for telling wine producers to raise their prices. Its idea of a feature is a dollar off on a $20 bottle of swill. And the only reason that some people like the LCBO is because it is not as mind and taste-destroying as those disgusting beer stores.
The novel idea that beer and wine go with food has led to the Wynne government letting some 60 of the very large grocery stores, out of about 1400 in that category in the province, sell beer, wine and cider. It really does broaden the shopping experience in those few stores if you stumble across an end aisle display of a few brands of warm beer. Just do not expect a bartender or sommelier to appear. And in those stores, you really have to be sober to find that cache of booze. There will be limited brands of beer, some cider and some real wine might make an appearance this fall.
Brooks will not have to worry about the competition from Loblaws and the rest of the grocery stores.
What Brooks really needs to worry about is the political football that the LCBO has become. Convenience in beer sales can include convenience stores and there must be millions of Ontario consumers who would delight in the ability to walk to the corner store for a cold six-pack. That change would have less impact on the LCBO than privatization of liquor and wine sales. Bear in mind that the LCBO is already the largest single importer of wines in North America and if it was privatized and properly run, it could dominate wine sales throughout the Americas.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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