UFCW calls for sober second thought on beer in Ontario's corner stores

After the total fiasco of Doug Ford's "buck-a-beer" distraction attempt his austerity government is now looking to turn attention from their vicious, petty cuts by putting beer and wine in Ontario's corner stores.

While many find this attractive as it could presumably mean greater short-term consumer convenience, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) are pointing out that it would have a serious impact on jobs, prices and the environment. 

The UFCW, in a post entitled Support good union jobs at The Beer Store, notes that:

The evidence is clear: expanding beer sales to convenience, big box, and other retail outlets would result in major job losses, higher beer prices for consumers, the end to a vital recycling system, and massive costs to Ontario taxpayers. It’s time to say “NO!” to Doug Ford’s irresponsible, job-killing plan for beer sales. 

The union is distributing flyers (pictured here) at The Beer Store and is calling on people to sign an online petition in opposition to the government's plans. 

See also: Ford and all his MPPs took away your rights at work. Tell them how you feel about it!

See also: Why not make Ontario's Beer Store public?

Stop trashing the LCBO!

By A.M.

The holidays are just around the corner, which means many different things. Brutal meals with relatives you hate, mountains of credit card debt, and a lot of drinking. For most Canadians, that results in lots and lots of trips to your friendly neighbourhood liquor store. Quebec has its SAQ; Ontario has its LCBO; British Columbia has its Liquor Distribution Branch. To the intense chagrin of most Ontario drinkers (or so it seems), our system of alcohol delivery doesn't appear to be changing in any fundamental way. I want to go a little outside the box here, and give a defense of the publicly-owned liquor store.

Within a ten minute walk from my house, in different directions, there are three LCBO locations. Each store, whether consciously or not, caters to different demographics. One stocks lots of tall cans and coolers (for teenagers, I suppose), one focuses on wine, and the other - a sort of superstore - has loads of craft beer and expensive liquors. This is something that I have yet to see Ontario's private beer monopoly, The Beer Store, attempt to replicate in any noticeable way. And why would it? It's got a lock on the beer market and precisely zero incentive to change.

Whether shopping near my downtown Toronto home, out in the suburbs or deep in rural Ontario, my experience of the LCBO has been overwhelmingly positive. The staff -- while constantly stocking shelves, drawing up orders and handling cashier duties -- is knowledgeable and attentive. Many stores have a resident beer or wine expert on hand -- and sometimes both! Notwithstanding the many times I was refused service for being obviously underage (those were the days!), my feeling is that the LCBO is at least as good at customer service as, say, Best Buy or Loblaw's. Score one for Big Brother.

Much more importantly, the LCBO is one of the last vestiges of reliable, well-paying work in the retail sector. Workers start off there making $14-15/hour, which is unfortunately quite far above Ontario's current minimum wage. This is unheard of in the private retail sector. There are, of course, numerous problems with the LCBO employment practices. Workers can only get permanently hired after working two ‘fixed terms’ at an LCBO store. Those fixed terms are from May-September and mid-November to New Year's. After jumping that hurdle, you can then apply to be considered for a permanent position.

This policy is insanity. It is but one of several nonsensical practices that gets thrown at the wall when ill-informed people trash the LCBO. But really, doesn’t every company engage utterly brutal hiring and firing practices? You can be fired at any point in your first three months of employment at a new job in Ontario, for any reason. It’s almost as if the LCBO is merely reflecting the current neo-liberal trend of precarious work…or maybe it’s simply that the public service is incompetent and we should sell the remnants of it to private interests. That must be it. Privatization, after all, has worked out so extraordinarily well for the average worker over the last thirty years!

And what of public safety? In most discussions surrounding Ontario’s liquor laws, we hear a lot about the rights of consumers to buy alcohol at their local grocery or convenience store. This is not a meaningful goal for any Crown corporation. Simply put, you do not have a ‘right’ to buy alcohol in the same way that you have the right to clean water or nourishing food. Alcohol is a completely extraneous expense, akin to ice cream or a pack of Skittles. For a small and obvious part of the population, it’s a vicious addiction. The LCBO, as part of its social responsibility platform, maintains a commitment to not serve the intoxicated. Absent any sort of meaningful public policy to reduce and eliminate addiction, there is very little the LCBO can do to end the misuse and abuse of alcohol. It does, however, do a pretty good job of keeping alcohol away from the visibly intoxicated. True to form, nearly all commentators and free-market types ignore this vital component of the LCBO.

That and the fact that the LCBO – even considering that it only controls 20% of beer sales – profits the province to the tune of $2 billion annually. This is then used (ostensibly) on social programs, infrastructure and the like.

As for the LCBO's much-discussed retail issues, I can certainly identify a few. First and most obviously are the ridiculous hours of operation. The three LCBO locations nearest to me all have vastly different closing times. Even on a busy Saturday night, like Halloween this year, they were all closed by 10 P.M (and one closed at 8!). It's obviously not the biggest inconvenience in the world to have to buy liquor during the day, at least for me, but many people work weekends and late nights. Especially downtown, many people don't get off of work until after the LCBO closes. Aside from being a stupid idea from the perspective of seeking a profit, this also violates the spirit of the LCBO's emphasis on equity and social access. The LCBO ought to have consistent hours across all of its locations.

It should also have more stores. Liquor is, for better or worse, extremely popular. People in all areas want to drink, and if the LCBO wants to keep Ontarians on its side, it should cater to them more than it does. Many elderly Ontarians, and those with disabilities, cannot walk extended distances to obtain a bottle of wine or a six-pack. I suggest that the LCBO also implement a home delivery system that could be subsidized by its own profits. This could include a Toronto Public Library style "product sharing" program, wherein customers can reserve hard-to-find items at their local store and have it delivered. If it can work for the TPL, it surely can work for another, equally successful public entity!

Minor quibbles aside, Ontarians ought to be very proud of their LCBO. This is a Crown corporation that returns billions of dollars to us every year. It works, however imperfectly, to promote responsible consumption of alcohol. It also provides (relatively) good jobs across the province, with an emphasis on hiring those from marginalized social groups. In these neo-liberal times, we need social ownership more than ever. I encourage you to look past the small convenience of beer and wine in corner stores, and support the LCBO!

A.M. is a writer. 

See also: Why not make Ontario's Beer Store public?

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share? Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

Why not make Ontario's Beer Store public?

Ontario's "Beer Store" chain has always been something of a curious anomaly. 

While Ontarians can buy beer at the LCBO (the government owned retail liquor store) and a handful of other retail outlets, the reality is that close to 80% of all beer sales in the province are at the Beer Store, making it a virtual monopoly.

Contrary to what many people believe, however, the Beer Store is not publicly or even Canadian owned. It is owned almost entirely by two large multinational beer corporations with a third owning a small part as well.

There is some dispute as to whether or not the Beer Store itself makes any money (some have claimed it makes as much as $700 million a year in profits) or whether it is simply a revenue neutral distribution mechanism (as the multinational owners claim), but there is little doubt that its private owners benefit from it.

Otherwise why would they so zealously oppose any attempts to infringe on its turf?

The Beer Store can and certainly seems to favour certain beers to the detriment of the province's smaller or craft breweries. It also sells the cases of 24 beers so popular with consumers while the LCBO does not (by agreement).

As one beer blogger put it:

The Beer Store’s 440 outlet stores represent the place where 79% of Ontarians go to buy beer–and for the most part, the beers people are buying at The Beer Store are the brands owned by The Beer Store’s owner breweries. 

Now, none of these breweries will offer up sales figures in relation to their Beer Store sales but consider the sales of the five most popular brands of beer at the province’s other alcohol outlet, the LCBO. The five biggest selling brands of beer in Ontario, all of which are owned by either Molson-Coors or AB InBev, accounted for $193.7 million in sales in 2010, $184.9 million in 2012, and $193.4 million in 2013. And those are just the figures that are available for the LCBO. That is, the place that only sells six packs. Consider what kind of financial windfall is enjoyed by these three big companies when you consider the fact that the store they happen to own (440 of of them to be precise) is the only place in Ontario that you can get beer in larger formats than six packs and is a place essentially custom-designed to tailor to customers who roll in to buy 2-4s of the same beer they’ve been drinking since they were sneaking it from their dads’ fridge in the garage.

As anyone who has shopped in many of these outlets can attest, they are often designed to produce this result, with primarily the best selling beers on the often very "no-frills" retail floor, when there is a retail floor at all, while all the others have to be ordered off of a list on the wall and are hidden away in the storeroom. There can be little doubt the effect this has on sales.

This distribution system should be changed.

The Ontario Liberal government, however, appears to have predictably come up with a plan to do this that will shift beer profits from one group of big corporations to another.

According to reports they may be set to allow beer and wine sales in large supermarkets. while continuing to prohibit sales in smaller grocers and corner stores.

Sadly, this reflects the lack of political imagination and slavish devotion to principles of  private sector dominance that grips our narratives in North America in the neo-liberal era.

Given that the Beer Store jobs are good paying union jobs and that it has an established and very successful recycling program, and given that the Beer Store infrastructure and monopoly lends itself to government ownership and is already in place, why not make it public?

Any money it makes (and it is difficult to believe it turns no profit of any kind and clearly money can be  and is made, all over the world, in the "distribution" of beer and wine in a retail setting) would be added to the government coffers that we are constantly told are cash-strapped. While there would, no doubt, be costs associated with making it public, once done it would continue to generate revenue as long as it remained in public hands.

The LCBO generates in excess of $1.5 billion for the government every year, putting the lie to the notion that only the private sector can make money in retail.

Further, as the government, unlike the big breweries, has no vested interest in promoting specific brands of beer, craft and local beers could be featured on equal footing, as they are at the LCBO, which could only have a positive impact on the Ontario craft brewing industry. Shifting sales to supermarkets is unlikely to do this as they are nearly certain to primarily stock the bigger brands.

While making the Beer Store public would no doubt not please those who seek greater "convenience" in beer and wine sales, the government is not looking at a truly convenience based plan anyway, which would obviously be centered around the many of thousands of appropriately named convenience stores in Ontario.

Ultimately, consumer convenience is not  a meaningful or important social or government policy objective anyway.

Instead of making the Beer Store a publicly owned operation, a seemingly unthinkable idea (not advocated for by any political party in the legislature) in an era where governments in general worship at the alter of corporations and where the government in Ontario may be poised to privatize yet more public utilities, we will instead watch as profits are shifted from one set of powerful private interests to another.

photo via wikimedia commons