PA. PROPOSAL WOULD MOVE ALCOHOL INTO SUPERMARKETS

BARBARA MURRAY

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Beginning a new phase in a longstanding debate over how alcohol is sold in this state, the Democratic candidate for governor, Ed Rendell, recently proposed that state stores selling alcohol lease space from supermarkets.

A system of 638 state stores sells wine and liquor currently, and the Independent State Store Union, representing state store managers, opposes the Rendell idea.

Beer and wine laws in the United States in general need to be relaxed, since these are common table beverages, said Barry Scher, spokesman for Ahold USA, Chantilly, Va., which has supermarkets in Pennsylvania.

"The vast majority of states clearly permit food stores to sell beer and wine and even, in some states, distilled spirits. It's time that the approximately dozen states that have very stringent regulations disallowing food stores to sell beer and wine change their practices," Scher told SN.

"Customers should have the right to purchase table beverages anywhere they want because this is the free enterprise system, and such laws are antiquated."

Attorney General Mike Fisher, who is the Republican gubernatorial nominee, has favored privatization of the state stores for almost three decades.

Dave McCorkle, president of the Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association, Harrisburg, and of the Pennsylvania Convenience Store Council, said a task force would be appointed to work on this issue once the election is over.

Maryland has the same law as Pennsylvania: no beer, wine or spirits in food stores or even C-stores, said Scher, who in 1979, 1980 and 1981 chaired the Committee on Fair Marketing Practices of major food and chain stores that wanted to change the law in Maryland. The effort did not succeed, but he said the interested chains would take a look at the issue again in 2003.

Coincidentally, Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker and Wendell W. Young III, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, signed a new state liquor-store contract on Oct. 22 that raises the starting salary of a liquor-store clerk to $9.97 an hour, from $7.73. Schweiker is not running for re-election.

The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board is the largest single purchaser of wine and spirits in the country, according to its chairman, Jonathan H. Newman.

Moving state stores into supermarkets would destroy the reason for having them separate, according to Ed Cloonan, president of the ISSU. In a statement, he said that if state stores are leased in supermarkets, "the number of children who will come to experience alcohol sold in supermarkets will increase tenfold over the number of children presently visiting state stores."

He also said: "Our state store jobs are only secure in an alcohol control system in Pennsylvania that neither promotes nor exploits the sale of alcohol." Whether supermarkets could or would lease stores either inside an existing store or adjacent to one is a concept that Scher said needs further exploration. It has been done in some states, but is not prevalent within the retail food industry, he said.

As for Cloonan's objection to children being exposed to alcohol in a grocery store, Scher said, "He is armchair-quarterbacking a concept that has been thought of, and in many cases is a store-within-a-store or a store located adjacent to the food store with a roll-up doorway into the liquor stores. There are ways that state stores have been accommodated, as a compromise between the state-owned stores and the retailers."