Don't Back Down

Back in 1937, the North Carolina General Assembly created a system of control for "spirituous liquor" in the state. This act allowed voters in each county to determine whether or not liquor would be sold at retail, and if it would be sold, their vote would create an ABC board in that county, which in turn would be able to run one - yes, one - retail ABC store. Some seventy years later, there are 156 separate ABC systems in North Carolina and 392 retail stores.

Obviously something has changed, since there should be a one-to-one correlation with those numbers, and that is obviously not the case. I can personally say that there are nineteen in Charlotte, according to the search tool on the site. I haven't been to each of them. According to a recent article in the Charlotte Observer, while two-thirds of the boards run only one store, as was originally intended, there are actually nine boards in Brunswick Country operating ten stores. So I don't know how it works, I just know that it's a really odd setup.

I'm sure that the original intention was for the local population (that is, the county) to have control over their own store, and thus the establishment of the local board. But this is just crazy.

Each of these boards creates needless redundancy in operations that have to cross over each other. Perhaps seventy years ago there weren't many places where they could see this overlap - chances are that they may not have even known each other existed. But today it makes an enormous amount of sense to combine those operations. Just combining the ordering process alone would have the potential to save the state a great deal of money. Whether they choose to pass it along to consumers or not is entirely up to them.

Combine that with the ability to save on uniform decision-making processes such as design and hours, as well as administration tasks, making such a move now makes for the best decision by a long shot. If there are differences between counties where some things might not be available for sale, that could easily be handled by simple computer software - quite possible even off-the-shelf or Open Source software, meaning that each board and store wouldn't be on their own in this regard either.

The main argument against making such a move is that a number of people may be put out of a job, and that's certainly understandable. With 156 boards condensed into 1, there will certainly be some job losses. But where a smaller board can be run by a couple of people, a larger board can't. So it's not a direct comparison. If 600 jobs are eliminated from boards that no longer exist, a decent number of those will be created in a statewide board that didn't exist previously. What's more, the state will need to have some form of distribution, and perhaps a regional warehouse facility as well. So while there is some loss, it's not going to be complete. Using a more efficient method of operation may even produce jobs in the long run, rather than allowing a stagnant and outdated system to continue operating - and more importantly, wasting resources.