This weekend, local football fans may have headed to the grocery store, pleased that they could pick up beer for their Super Bowl bashes there.
In the last nine months, two Valley grocery stores have acquired licenses that allow them to sell beer and malt beverages.
They may have cheered the step forward in convenience for the consumer, assuming their gathering required no more than a 12-pack of beer. Tucked in the vagaries of the state’s liquor licensing law is a limit on the amount of beer that a customer can buy from establishments operating with an eatery or restaurant license.
Twelve 16-ounce beers, to be exact.
This is the same sort of nanny-state logic that forces those with the sniffles to display a driver’s license and provide personal information to the pharmacist because a bogey-man some place might horde pseudophedrine to make methamphetamine.
Complying with the liquor law is not that difficult, admittedly. A customer can buy one 12-pack of beer, carry it out to the car and then return to purchase another. Or, the customer can shrug and head to the nearest beer distributor and pick up a full case of 24 cans or bottles, a trip that likely will translate into a greater value in per-unit pricing.
What is fundamentally unclear is how inconveniencing the customer serves any useful purpose.
Our roads are no safer because the customer has to buy one 12-pack at a time. A liquor control board spokesman said the grocery stores pick the licenses they seek, and the limits date to the end of Prohibition.
Pennsylvania’s liquor control system has made fitful, modest steps toward providing legal consumers of alcohol the type of convenient access enjoyed by residents of many other states. Later this year, the liquor control board will even roll out wine vending machines in grocery stores across the commonwealth.
Liquor control is serious business. The commonwealth’s efforts ought to be directed toward keeping alcohol out of reach of those too young to drink and keeping drunken drivers off the road. Pennsylvania’s liquor laws ought to be revamped to focus solely on those goals and tear down the needless barriers that do little but annoy those who merely wish to toast the underdog, but victorious, New Orleans Saints.
