Top-10 Reasons to Choose Booze or Lose

The Terrible 10: Whether You’re a Boozer (drinker) or Chooser (non-drinker), the PLCB Makes You a Loser.  Find out the top-10 reasons that government in the booze business is a lose business!

The Chooser’s Top Five Reasons Government Booze Bombs

  1. Costly mission conflict. With one hand, the PLCB spends $10 million each year to promote alcohol consumption, and with the other it is charged with enforcing alcohol violations and educating citizens of the dangers of over consumption. The PLCB operates like a pyromaniac preaching fire prevention, and Pennsylvanians can easily see the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of this dual mission.
  2. Crass advertising campaigns. Last fall the PLCB debuted a shocking and distasteful ad campaign that implied rape victims that drank too much were to blame for their rape. The ads were quickly pulled after a national outcry, but taxpayers still footed the bill for the $650,000 campaign.
  3. The Wine Shrine. As a taxpayer, you own a Wine Shrine. Even if you were a drinker, you’d never get to use it. But using $35,000 of your tax dollars, the PLCB paid for a deluxe wine tasting room complete with leather sofas and flat screen televisions. Why? So that a government-employed tasting team replete with hefty taxpayer-funded pensions can sit in the lap of luxury while they educate your palate.
  4. Free booze for broken bottles. State liquor stores have a policy whereby consumers can simply pour out bottle contents, break the bottle, return it to the PLCB and they will replace it, no questions asked! No surprise that with a policy like this they lost $2.5 million worth of wine and liquor: bottles broken, stolen or just plain missing. The year before, it was $3 million.
  5. Sixty-six million more reasons. The PLCB blew through $66 million—nearly two-and-a-half times the originally estimated cost—for an inventory system that failed, causing initial widespread shortages. This caused massive hoarding by store managers and led to the over-ordering of alcohol. The PLCB stored hundreds of thousands of cases of inventory in non-temperature controlled trailers that cost an additional $500,000, with untold millions lost from spoilage.

The Boozer’s Top Five Reasons the PLCB Falls Flat

  1. Not free to choose. We can pick our blue jeans, Band Aids, and bananas, why not our booze too? Instead, we are subjects of the Kings of Cabernet, a small cadre of tasters who literally fly around the world on our tax dollars picking wine winners and liquor losers. We know what we like without having royal taste testers to tell us.
  2. Bootlegging bonanza. Have you been across the border to a Total Wine? Or an out-of-state Trader Joe’s? We have. (But just to see what selection and competitive pricing in states without a monopoly looks like!) Turns out plenty of Pennsylvanians want to see how the other states live: In just eight Southeast Pennsylvania counties alone, taxpayers lose $40 million per year due to bootlegging.
  3. Freedom: There’s no app for that. The PLCB spent $100,000 dollars to create an iPhone application that can instantly show you how much more expensive that bottle of wine you found out of state is in Pennsylvania, but alas, cannot give you the quickest directions to Delaware or New Jersey.
  4. Breathalyzers? Boo! It seems no wine enthusiast was enthused by the idea of blowing into a breathalyzer in the supermarket so a state employee could confirm their sobriety before buying a bottle of wine from a vending machine. Wine kiosks were anything but convenient and ultimately costly. The PLCB went against an evaluation committee’s recommendation and awarded the kiosk contract to a vendor that donated to former Gov. Rendell’s campaign. The vendor then stiffed taxpayers $1 million and counting.
  5. Boozers and choosers unite! Nearly 70 percent of Pennsylvanians support liquor store privatization: Boozers, choosers, Republicans, Democrats, Independents—even union households!

We know there are more reasons than 10 to get rid of the PLCB, so let us know yours.  Visit www.letfreedomdrink.com.