A company that thrived under the "Only Place You Can Get a Case of Beer" business model is struggling now that you can get cases of beer from other places. Go figure.
The only shocking thing about any of this is that it took multiple generations, including seven entire years under a pro-alcohol-liberalization government, to get to this point.
In many places, this would be a day one move. Pass laws that any beer can be sold anywhere that qualifies for a reasonably easily obtained licence, compensate any stakeholders that you are obligated to compensate, and let the monopoly fall.
I will be the first in line to light the pyre of any business that has historically prospered primarily due to monopolistic protections. No sympathy whatsoever.
I don’t think anyone is weeping any tears for the American multinational owners having to wind down their The Beer Store business. They’re basically closing stores as their sales collapse, so they’re not even losing money on a month-over-month basis. This is a pretty typical corporate wind-down; actually maybe more orderly than most (Hudson’s Bay?)
I think the real point of this article, the buried lede, is why the Ford government paid such a huge fee to them to break their contract a year early?
Alberta privatized all alcohol sales 30 years ago. The system has worked well. The liquor store in the little strip mall 2 blocks from my house has a nice selection of beer, wine and spirits and is open long hours.
Three or four years ago I was travelling through rural Ontario and went into a beer store to get a six pack of the local craft. It instantly took me back to my youth in Alberta. The beer (most of it) was behind the counter and you had to place your order at the front and they would go and search for it.
The very helpful sales person, told me that they had a computerized catalogue of everything the beer store offered, but they unfortunately did not have most of it in their store. There was no way to peruse the shelves and find something of interest. I let her pick some for me and it was good, but what a dumb system.
When I complained to my Ontario friends, they replied at least its not like Alberta. Not sure what their gripe was, but I couldn't see any way in which the beer store was superior.
The recycling/re-use program is better than the blue box, most of which gets contaminated and sent to landfill. We actually should reinstate the across-the-board deposit and return program of decades gone by that applied to all beverages, including milk and pop. The plastics industry wins, and garbage proliferated.
From what I understand about recycling, the entire focus should be on metal and glass, which can be recycled / re-used effectively. Paper mostly turns into contamnated soggy slop, and most plastic cannot be effectively recycled for less cost and energy than making it new.
We have ended up with a whole industry that appears predicated on counterproductive wish-casting when most of it ends up as garbage with extra steps. I have read that much of modern recycling began as a greenwashing PR scheme by the disposable plastics industry.
That’s exactly the case — most modern plastics popularized since the 1990s are effectively not recyclable. Plastic packaging today is VERY different from what it was in the 1990s when it was thick PET and HDPE. Today it’s multilayer flexible, PLA/PHA bioplastic, expanded polypropylene and polystyrene, and my personal most hated, the ultrathin LDPE films all over every Chinese product.
If we properly forced packaging makers or the corporate users of packaging to internalize the externalized cost of forever plastics, a lot of of those non-recyclable things would become less cost competitive and we might actually go back to more glass, metal, and old-school thick plastic packaging that can be cost-effectively recycled.
Sadly, revealed preference shows that we’d rather have more cheap convenient shit today than a liveable environment tomorrow 🤷🏻♂️
Honestly, the recycling program is a pain in the ass. I would far rather keep my 10¢ per can and throw them in the blue bin. It may have made sense when the majority of beer was being sold in standardized brown bottles that could be washed and reused, but at this point it's just a relic of another time, and should die with the monopoly that ran it.
When two parties have a contract and one wants out of course there is a "break fee". And it is pretty clear that the Beer Store guys knew they were going to be big losers from the breakup. So we could have kept the deal for another year of unpopular beer store monopoly and they would have made profits of $225 million (from taxpayer/consumers pockets] or the govt could deliver the benefits of competition and more local outlets sooner by paying those anticipated profits to them now. In return they made the contracted [anticipated] profits and we got the local sales and what just about everyone says is a better system, sooner. Either way the $225 million was going to be spent by the consumer or on their behalf. I'll vote for the open market "why wait" option.
I sense throughout the article that the writer suffers from the colonial canadian version of TDS, where damn the results the non-left must be denigrated.
"Either way the $225 million was going to be spent by the consumer or on their behalf." Agreed! And, as a beer consumer, having the cost spread over the entire tax paying population, non-consumers included, it works for me. As for those who never set foot inside a Beer Store, not so much I suppose.
Ford conservatives got a little flack for the payoff to the beer store, but not nearly as much as they should have another example of this government just wasting taxpayer dollars and why it would be nice to have a real choice next election time. The demise of the beer store is entirely predictable and the closing of stores especially predictable given real estate cost in Toronto. In addition to giving $250 million of our money to the beer store the Ford government also seem to have neglected to come up with any alternative recycling program and so like other commenters here, I am now on my 4th store as one t one closer ones shut and then the next closest one is so small it often says it can only take Beer Store bottles/cans not LCBO wine bottles. Now maybe the Ford gang will pull something out the hat that is amazing but somehow I doubt that.
Gosh. I wonder what would happen to the price of milk, butter, ice cream, etc. if, like the Beer Store, we eliminated supply management monopolies? Then chicken and eggs ……..
Multiple studies, authored or co-authored by professor Anindya Sen of the University of Waterloo, estimated (a decade ago) that the Beer Store monopoly has allowed it to capture between $450 and $630 million in “additional profits” each year, despite the Beer Store being run as a non-profit (with higher prices passing profit up to the supplier-ownership).
Comparing to Quebec, after factoring tax differences and differences in distribution (Costco), they found price differences of $1.30 - $3.30 (I'll use $2.30) for 24-bottle packs.
So, I guess the $255 million comes down to the good people of Ontario buying more than 8.15 million cases a month (if the savings from the introduction of competition are $2.30/unit).
If Ontario beer sales were $1.408 billion CAD (year ending March 31, 2024, Statista numbers), and this somehow were all to be 24s (at about $50), it would only amount to a paltry 2.35 million cases a month (I would have guessed there were more hosers in Ontario, but what do I know).
Statcan appears to indicate beer consumption volume is about twice that, if Ontario numbers are close to national average, but that's still only 4.77 million 24s a month.
That means $255 million is a really bad deal and the only way for the consumers of the province to win on that is to get beer consumption way up and never buy any of it from The Beer Store!
Oakville has only two beer stores, despite having a population of over 200,000. Three stores have closed in the past year. It still has a good selection of beers, but there is fewer staff than in the past.
Fascinating. The only thing dumber than the Beer Store is the alcohol only recycling that takes place there.
The only shocking thing about any of this is that it took multiple generations, including seven entire years under a pro-alcohol-liberalization government, to get to this point.
In many places, this would be a day one move. Pass laws that any beer can be sold anywhere that qualifies for a reasonably easily obtained licence, compensate any stakeholders that you are obligated to compensate, and let the monopoly fall.
I will be the first in line to light the pyre of any business that has historically prospered primarily due to monopolistic protections. No sympathy whatsoever.
I don’t think anyone is weeping any tears for the American multinational owners having to wind down their The Beer Store business. They’re basically closing stores as their sales collapse, so they’re not even losing money on a month-over-month basis. This is a pretty typical corporate wind-down; actually maybe more orderly than most (Hudson’s Bay?)
I think the real point of this article, the buried lede, is why the Ford government paid such a huge fee to them to break their contract a year early?
And now let’s move onto the LCBO
Alberta privatized all alcohol sales 30 years ago. The system has worked well. The liquor store in the little strip mall 2 blocks from my house has a nice selection of beer, wine and spirits and is open long hours.
Three or four years ago I was travelling through rural Ontario and went into a beer store to get a six pack of the local craft. It instantly took me back to my youth in Alberta. The beer (most of it) was behind the counter and you had to place your order at the front and they would go and search for it.
The very helpful sales person, told me that they had a computerized catalogue of everything the beer store offered, but they unfortunately did not have most of it in their store. There was no way to peruse the shelves and find something of interest. I let her pick some for me and it was good, but what a dumb system.
When I complained to my Ontario friends, they replied at least its not like Alberta. Not sure what their gripe was, but I couldn't see any way in which the beer store was superior.
The recycling/re-use program is better than the blue box, most of which gets contaminated and sent to landfill. We actually should reinstate the across-the-board deposit and return program of decades gone by that applied to all beverages, including milk and pop. The plastics industry wins, and garbage proliferated.
From what I understand about recycling, the entire focus should be on metal and glass, which can be recycled / re-used effectively. Paper mostly turns into contamnated soggy slop, and most plastic cannot be effectively recycled for less cost and energy than making it new.
We have ended up with a whole industry that appears predicated on counterproductive wish-casting when most of it ends up as garbage with extra steps. I have read that much of modern recycling began as a greenwashing PR scheme by the disposable plastics industry.
That’s exactly the case — most modern plastics popularized since the 1990s are effectively not recyclable. Plastic packaging today is VERY different from what it was in the 1990s when it was thick PET and HDPE. Today it’s multilayer flexible, PLA/PHA bioplastic, expanded polypropylene and polystyrene, and my personal most hated, the ultrathin LDPE films all over every Chinese product.
If we properly forced packaging makers or the corporate users of packaging to internalize the externalized cost of forever plastics, a lot of of those non-recyclable things would become less cost competitive and we might actually go back to more glass, metal, and old-school thick plastic packaging that can be cost-effectively recycled.
Sadly, revealed preference shows that we’d rather have more cheap convenient shit today than a liveable environment tomorrow 🤷🏻♂️
The Prohibition era Beer Store can't die soon enough. It's a great example of how Canadians are neglected at the expense of big businesses.
The recycling program is nice, but every other part of the world has solved this problem. I'm sure we can do it in Ontario.
Honestly, the recycling program is a pain in the ass. I would far rather keep my 10¢ per can and throw them in the blue bin. It may have made sense when the majority of beer was being sold in standardized brown bottles that could be washed and reused, but at this point it's just a relic of another time, and should die with the monopoly that ran it.
When two parties have a contract and one wants out of course there is a "break fee". And it is pretty clear that the Beer Store guys knew they were going to be big losers from the breakup. So we could have kept the deal for another year of unpopular beer store monopoly and they would have made profits of $225 million (from taxpayer/consumers pockets] or the govt could deliver the benefits of competition and more local outlets sooner by paying those anticipated profits to them now. In return they made the contracted [anticipated] profits and we got the local sales and what just about everyone says is a better system, sooner. Either way the $225 million was going to be spent by the consumer or on their behalf. I'll vote for the open market "why wait" option.
I sense throughout the article that the writer suffers from the colonial canadian version of TDS, where damn the results the non-left must be denigrated.
"Either way the $225 million was going to be spent by the consumer or on their behalf." Agreed! And, as a beer consumer, having the cost spread over the entire tax paying population, non-consumers included, it works for me. As for those who never set foot inside a Beer Store, not so much I suppose.
Ford conservatives got a little flack for the payoff to the beer store, but not nearly as much as they should have another example of this government just wasting taxpayer dollars and why it would be nice to have a real choice next election time. The demise of the beer store is entirely predictable and the closing of stores especially predictable given real estate cost in Toronto. In addition to giving $250 million of our money to the beer store the Ford government also seem to have neglected to come up with any alternative recycling program and so like other commenters here, I am now on my 4th store as one t one closer ones shut and then the next closest one is so small it often says it can only take Beer Store bottles/cans not LCBO wine bottles. Now maybe the Ford gang will pull something out the hat that is amazing but somehow I doubt that.
Gosh. I wonder what would happen to the price of milk, butter, ice cream, etc. if, like the Beer Store, we eliminated supply management monopolies? Then chicken and eggs ……..
Multiple studies, authored or co-authored by professor Anindya Sen of the University of Waterloo, estimated (a decade ago) that the Beer Store monopoly has allowed it to capture between $450 and $630 million in “additional profits” each year, despite the Beer Store being run as a non-profit (with higher prices passing profit up to the supplier-ownership).
Comparing to Quebec, after factoring tax differences and differences in distribution (Costco), they found price differences of $1.30 - $3.30 (I'll use $2.30) for 24-bottle packs.
So, I guess the $255 million comes down to the good people of Ontario buying more than 8.15 million cases a month (if the savings from the introduction of competition are $2.30/unit).
If Ontario beer sales were $1.408 billion CAD (year ending March 31, 2024, Statista numbers), and this somehow were all to be 24s (at about $50), it would only amount to a paltry 2.35 million cases a month (I would have guessed there were more hosers in Ontario, but what do I know).
Statcan appears to indicate beer consumption volume is about twice that, if Ontario numbers are close to national average, but that's still only 4.77 million 24s a month.
That means $255 million is a really bad deal and the only way for the consumers of the province to win on that is to get beer consumption way up and never buy any of it from The Beer Store!
Easily explained. Doug is an idiot.
Oakville has only two beer stores, despite having a population of over 200,000. Three stores have closed in the past year. It still has a good selection of beers, but there is fewer staff than in the past.
My English teacher lamented the downfall of society when it changed its name from Brewers Retail to The Beer Store.
She may have been onto something.
Yes, the recycling system is a loss.