Many of the older members of our campus community will have been introduced to ballot Question 1 by the rash of "Vote No on 1" posters at Liquors 44 in Hadley. For the benefit of the rest, the proposition would allow Massachusetts towns to issue a limited number of wine-only licenses to food stores. The proposal is supported largely because it would lower prices and increase consumer choice; opposed on the grounds that it would lead to an increase in underage drinking.
As petty as it may seem to pit one's want to buy "Two Buck Chuck" against the wellbeing of the Commonwealth's teenage imbibers, there is a basic rights issue at stake. Unless the state can show that there is a significant and real risk of public injury associated with the transaction, it has no business preventing me from buying my wine at Trader Joe's instead of Pop's Package Store.
In that case, the question becomes whether or not the proposition will significantly increase underage drinking. While it is indisputable that increasing number of venues where alcohol is sold will make it more difficult to enforce legal age limits, there is reason to believe that this effect will be minimal.
The question's opponents imagine alcohol in every convenience store, and significantly increased access for minors. However it seems much more likely that the change's impact will be seen in large grocery chains. Only a limited number of licenses are available per town, and the market will triage them to the stores that handle the largest volume. Furthermore, since the towns bear the enforcement and social cost of underage access to alcohol, they will have an incentive to allocate licenses to distributors who will be strict enforcers of the legal drinking age.
Large chains are those strict enforcers. Deep liability pockets, and the risk of losing licenses and public faith, make it costly for them to be anything else. Furthermore, since any bottle of wine constitutes a much higher fraction of a package store's business than a Whole Foods', the incentive to look the other way is much less at the latter. The same set of incentives that make liquor store chains much stricter on ID's than local package stores operate doubly on grocery chains who even have more to lose and less to gain because their main business is not in liquor sales.
Another nuance is that grocery stores that stock wine cannot have under-18 staff work their checkout. New licences will thus probably be used mostly by up-market groceries that can afford the higher wages, like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. These chains do not largely target an underage clientele.
As new growing regions have come into the world market, there has been an incredible expansion of the supply of good, affordable wine. This supply has been most effectively tapped by premium supermarkets, who have used bulk buying and their nationwide brands to deliver consistent and delicious products at affordable prices. To a certain extent Massachusetts has missed out. The very limited number of full liquor licenses or beer and wine licenses available to grocers has meant that service is limited to a few areas. A positive result on Question 1 would prove of great value to the state's consumers, and come at only small social cost.
Borowsky is a writer, living in Amherst. You could also call him an economics major, if you insist on getting specific.