As the owner of a small wine and spirits store in Endicott, NY, I would like to address your plan to increase state revenue by allowing wine to be sold in grocery stores in New York State. The only thing that I can see this doing is putting a lot of the smaller stores out of business. New York is always touting how “friendly” New York is to small business, but it seems that “small” to the politicians is having 500 or 1,000 employees. New York doesn’t seem to care about the “mom & pop” sized businesses who are an integral part of their communities.

                                     

My argument with this budget proposal is twofold. One:  In the wine and spirit business the larger quantity of product that you buy, the better price you get. Therefore the retail price to the consumer goes down. The large grocers will be able to take advantage of this on every wine they sell. They can afford it, unlike smaller stores, and they have the capacity to store the large quantity. Selling wine at a greatly reduced cost will hurt sales tax revenue. Has no one thought of this?

 

Two:  Many of the large grocery chains are headquartered in other states. The profits that are made on the sale of wines will be sent to the corporate headquarters. Currently, the money generated by liquor stores stays in New York, as the stores are all locally owned by people that live in New York, pay taxes in New York, and shop in New York. The large grocery stores won’t have to hire any more workers; wine will just be another product for them to sell. If this bill passes it WILL put many small stores out of business, increase the number of unemployed, and worsen the state’s economy, while making no difference in state revenues.

 

I do understand the dire economic straits that New York and other states face.

If the excise tax on alcohol must be raised, okay. Belts need to be

tightened. The state needs to generate more revenue. But I do not believe that allowing

wine to be sold in grocery stores will benefit the state in any way. The only ones to

benefit will be “Big Business”. So let’s show the small liquor stores that New York

State IS “Friendly to Small Business”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.