more funny liquor laws...
more funny liquor laws…
Colorado just changed their laws about liquor sales. Previously, you could only buy full-strength beer at a liquor store, and then only monday through saturday. No liquor sales (other than drinks in a bar or restaurant) on sunday. You could buy 3.2% beer in grocery stores all week, however. There was a funny exception to this: certain tobaccanists sold Colorado wines on Sunday. Supposedly this was a loophole which had the wine being considered “produce”. I only knew of one such tobaccanist, but if you wanted to buy something other than beer-flavored sodapop, that was what you could get. So recently, Colorado changed the laws, allowing liquor stores to sell on Sunday. Hooray!! But I’ve been surprised at the results. Not all liquor stores have embraced this new freedom. In a small local store I saw a note at the cash register which said, in effect, that they would not be open on Sundays so that their staff could have a day off with their family, etc. This didn’t seem to make much sense to me until I thought about it for a bit. Having the ability to sell liquor on Sunday is not necessarily a big win for the liquor store owners. Being open on Sunday means that they have to pay staff to be there, turn on the lights, etc, for what is probably not that much of a gain in sales. It’s probably a wash, the same amount of aggregate revenue for the week (people who buy on Sunday would have bought on Saturday). I suspect that over time this will change, but the immediate busines analysis of some stores has led them to decline to be open 7 days a week. Who’da thunk?