In New York City, you can now buy marijuana from colorful smoke shops. But here in America’s largest metropolis, you still can’t legally buy a bottle of wine from a grocery store.
The restriction dates back to the end of prohibition, and while most other US states have done away with similar laws, it has remained on the books in New York for close to a century, baffling visitors and frustrating residents.
“My first assumption is that someone’s profiting from [the rule] somehow,” says Andrew Laska, a Brooklyn-based engineer shopping at the Wegmans supermarket on his lunch break. “And it’s just old structures in place that are preventing change.”
His suspicions are correct: the biggest opponents of reform are New York City’s roughly 3,700 liquor stores, which have beaten back multiple attempts to allow wine to be sold in grocery stores, including a prominent push by the former governor David Paterson in 2009. The latest try, a New York state bill with the public support of the Wegmans company, also failed after this year’s legislative session ended on Thursday.
The bill’s sponsor, the state senator Liz Krueger, acknowledged the bill’s failure to the New York Post last week. “But I’m hoping that New Yorkers will take a look at our whole approach to how and where we sell different kinds of alcohol and say, ‘This doesn’t really make sense any more.’”
Paul Zuber, the executive vice-president of the Business Council, a New York industry group that represents Wegmans, blames “extremely organized, self-entrenched interests” for defending “this archaic, anti-business, anti-expansion statute”, which is “not what the people want”. A recent poll commissioned by Wegmans showed New Yorkers strongly in favor of allowing wine sales in grocery stores, including 70% of voters in New York City and 79% of voters upstate.
Wegmans reportedly donated more than $30,000 to the campaign, and it has even put up signs in its stores promoting the bill that read: “It’s time for wine.” The grocery chain did not return a request for comment.
But New York City liquor stores say they are defending an endangered, more intimate tradition of commerce that makes the city special. Allowing wine to be sold in supermarkets would be “another example of small businesses getting mauled”, says Michael Correra, the owner of a liquor store, Michael-Towne Wine and Spirits, and the executive director of the Metropolitan Package Store Association, which represents liquor stores across the city. “How many bakers and butchers are left? There’s no artisans any more. This is one of the few local businesses left,” he says.
If Krueger’s bill passed, it would upend rules that have been in place since 1934, when New York began regulating the sale of alcohol after prohibition. At the time, officials decided that liquor stores would be the only businesses able to sell spirits and wine, and each business owner could only have a single license. The idea was “to make it easy for people to obtain liquor and wine and at the same time be temperate … We can amend the rules, make changes if necessary later,” Edward P Mulrooney, then the chairman of New York’s alcohol and beverage control board, told the New York Times.
Officials back then envisioned liquor stores as local gatekeepers of the feared substance. Limiting sales to mom-and-pop stores meant “the owner is in the store all the time, he’s going to be part of the community, and he’s going to know when somebody has a drinking problem”, Zuber says.
Edward P Mulrooney might not have guessed that his rules would remain largely in place 89 years later. Today, along with the single-license rule and the ban on wine sales in grocery stores, New York City’s liquor stores still may not open before noon on Sunday. And until last year, liquor stores were forbidden to operate on Christmas Day.
“The argument from the liquor stores is: ‘Well, my family’s had this business since the 1930s. They started this business under a certain set of laws, and we can’t change those laws,’” Zuber says. “But the world has changed. If I got my driver’s license in the 1960s, and a cop pulls me over and says, ‘Where’s your seatbelt?’ I can’t say, ‘Well, those laws weren’t there when I got my license.’”
Correra says criticisms like these miss the point. His store has been operating out of the posh Brooklyn Heights neighborhood since 1934, which has allowed it to cultivate close bonds with customers – while keeping a watchful eye on them. “We do a hell of a good job of keeping it out of the hands of the wrong people,” he says. “I’ve seen pictures in other states where wine and liquor is sold in grocery stores, in floor displays next to Doritos. Or hard vodka next to Sunny D. People don’t want to see controlled products sold by 14-year-old kids. It just doesn’t happen in our state, and I’m proud to be a part of it,” he says.
Wine makes up over 70% of Michael-Towne’s sales. If the Gristedes grocery store across the street were allowed to start selling wine, the effect on his business would be “catastrophic”, says Correra. Same goes for other liquor store owners, many of them immigrants: “They work so hard, and they care, and this is gonna get demolished.”
New York’s liquor stores offer another selling point: interesting wines. At Myrtle Wines & Spirits, just a few blocks from the Brooklyn Wegmans, the wines are “almost all artisanal”, says the owner, Colin Clarke, who also operates a wine bar with festive decor next door. Small wine and spirit producers around the world “don’t have the marketing budget” to negotiate with big retailers, so small shops like Myrtle “step in and connect them to the customer”, says Clarke.
If Wegmans were to stock its shelves with wine, it would probably be full of mass market products, Clarke says: “You’d find the biggest distributors in the city feeding products to those places.”
Clarke sees his store as something that enlivens the surrounding area: “This is not a transactional business. We’re creating something that connects to the neighborhood, that people feel proud of.”
The question is what matters more to New Yorkers: community or convenience? Laska, the Brooklyn engineer, says he’d happily buy wine at Wegmans if the supermarket carried enough of a selection. But not, he adds, “if it was just Yellow Tail. I would want more than just the bottom of the barrel.”
