But if you’re thinking that “Drink Local” thing ONLY applies to drinking our home-grown producers, think again. What we have, in short, is the makings of a potent Washington economy in adult beverages. We have well over 200 working breweries in this state, now. Go ahead.Įsquin Wine Merchants of Seattle/Photo by /Josh Kerns Meanwhile, try finding more than one or two Washington beers being poured at a sports stadium, with the sole exception of SafeCo Field. The Blue Moon/Coors Cash goes to England. (No, Budweiser is NOT an American company, anymore). Ditto for all those beer taps at our locally-financed sports stadiums and concert halls and airports and other big venues all those beer taps which are, about 80%+ of the time, taken up with Budweiser and Stella and Coors and Pabst and Blue Moon and other mass-producer dishwater. The profits, which for a locally-owned shop would be used for expenses and then go into the bank account of owners who keep them HERE – for groceries, doctors, cars, utility bills, entertainment, in short, all the Stuff of Life – get sent to Concord, California, and Potomac, Maryland. Meanwhile, less than a half mile away, Pete’s Eastside – for a couple of decades, one of Washington’s true heroes in the battle to keep wine and beer prices reasonable – is taking it in the shorts daily as more and more Eastsiders wander off to Total Wine to do their wine, beer, and liquor shopping all in one place! I mean, Jesus, you can’t expect a person to drive one or two miles(!) to get their Bud and Jack when they’re within fifty feet of each other in store that looks exactly like the image I have in my head of what my life is supposed to be like! Not shopping at Total Wine would just be, like, SO inconvenient!īut here’s the catch: when you spend money at Total Wine and/or Bevmo, you’re siphoning that money out of our local economy. I go in there and walk around and, as I’m not challenged by doing simple addition in my head, I see folks with shopping carts that contain – with NO exaggeration – well over $750 worth of assorted booze, happily tooling around in search of more. BevMo, of course, since they opted to wedge themselves into a space that wouldn’t accommodate the average Starbucks, has far fewer customers but, as their prices are noticeably higher than even our independent local liquor stores, they probably do okay. BevMo, in fact, opened a small and laughably-inadequate store one block from my house, while TW&M took a defunct GI Joe’s Superstore location 1/2 mile away, both figuring, probably correctly, that Bellevue, Washington, would contain enough clueless, uber-affluent yuppies who wouldn’t give two poots about supporting local businesses to make both happily profitable. ![]() When the good people of the state of Washington voted – as they bloody well should have – to privatize liquor sales, one of the pitfalls of suddenly having the keys to the world’s liquor cabinet thrust into our sweaty little hands is that we invited in the involvement of not only our own home-grown menace, Costco, but out-of-state behemoths like BevMo, based in Concord, California, and Total Wine & More, based in Potomac, Maryland. So, if you’re a loyal and devoted fan and patron of BM or TW&M and this offends you… Just like with freedom of speech, however, your right to say or do anything comes with the right of those around you to criticize your words or your choices and nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights does it say a word about getting to be oblivious and short-sighted with no comebacks. Now, this being America – still, against all odds and the best efforts of a TON of reactionary yahoos to turn it into Nazi Germany – you can shop any ol’ place you like. If you patronize either of the big chain liquor operations – Total Wine & More or BevMo – you may very well be saving yourself a few bucks on your adult beverage purchases but you’re screwing your neighbors and sucking the vitality out of your own local economy. You just sometimes forget, so I’ll shorten it considerably…and, believe me, this IS the short version.
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