Privatizing Virginia Liquor Stores

A candidate for Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell if I have his name right, hit on a way to take advantage of the state's current difficulties in funding much-needed transportation projects in its northern and eastern areas, by mixing in some basic Republican ideology, and that is to privatize the liquor store concession, which is run entirely by the state. So it's not surprising that, like privatizing in general, this is a bad idea.

When I moved from D.C. to Virginia several decades ago, one of the interesting differences was the liquor stores. Though it was hard to believe that Virginia had so fewer serious drinkers, there was hardly a liquor store to be seen, at least to know what it was. Nowhere to catch the eye were the garish displays of the D.C. booze sellers, whose exteriors left no doubt about the wares inside. Instead you had, and still have, "ABC stores," and they are precisely as rarely found and modestly signed as the Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah's Witnesses, so I am not really sure as to how Virginia imbibers keep themselves sufficiently stocked, though I'm sure that they do.

If the ABC store that I know anything about is typical, you go through a totally nondescript, spartan doorway and find yourself at the end of an elongated space, where all the bottles are in racks extending to the right, deep into the other end of the store, instead of the wares being behind counters as in the D.C. of my days there or maybe, for all I know, nowadays securely locked up behind stout plexiglass barriers.

Just beyond the ABC doorway sits a pair of simple cash registers, manned by women as often as not, who were never seen in the D.C. stores to my recollections, and never in the Virginia liquor places do you see the sweaty. sleazy-looking clerks of D.C. liquor stores, who somehow also managed to look as desperate as their clientele -- or so it always seemed to me.

And the ABC stores are quiet, and totally uncrowded. In fact, whenever I've gone in there over the years to get my usual fifth of Applejack brandy, made in Virginia and which I measure out in the bottle's cap, one a night most nights, to flavor my ice cream and that's all -- usually I've been the only customer in there, and the place has a cool, calm solemnity. It's all business, cut to the bone. You pick what you want from the racks, carry the bottles to the cash registers, and hand the cashier cold cash -- no checks or the like wanted. Just cash on the barrelhead.

All in all, the Virginia ABC stores are pretty wild, and they're perfect. They're a great Quality of Life thing, and I don't know why anyone would want to do away with that.

Hard drugs, which, if robbed of their profitabitlty by being made legal, would wreak far less havoc generally speaking than alcohol ever could, should be sold in the same way. But this is such a sensible idea and the level of ignorance about "controlled substances" is so abysmally high that no one would ever have the temerity to think of it, much less to suggest it and to do things to bring it about, despite all the good that doing so would reap for the society.

Meanwhile I don't see how privatizing the Virginia liquor stores would gain any money in the long run, as they are so are so lacking in frills of any kind that they must be very low cost to keep going. I guess there would be mostly a big initial bonanza as commercial interests would rush in to take advantage of the opportunities left behind by the 330 departed ABC stores. But beyond that things would soon descend into some very un-Virginia-like squalor in short order.

Proposals nevertheless keep being made to privatize Virginia's public sector liquor stores, but they keep being voted down, even by a few otherwise staunch Republicans.

This is one more instance of how modern life reduces one to living in a permanent state of keeping one's fingers crossed, lest the forces of Darkness win out over the Light, as they so constantly try to do, and to which the U.S. in particular seems condemned, because it took that legacy too lightly from the beginning.