Archives for the 'Virginia' tag
Better Booze in Virginia, At Last?
Liquor stores in Virginia are terrible (so bad they probably caused fellow Crispy blogger Jacob to flee the area!). They’re owned and operated by the commonwealth’s Department Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), and if you’re looking for anything snootier or more unusual than Maker’s Mark, you’re probably SOL. The lighting is bleak. The clerks have all the enthusiasm for their product of middling DMV employees. (Come to think of it, DMV employees may actually be more enthusiastic about the work+hooch combo than ABC staff.) And the hours are inconvenient.
But serious Old Dominion boozehounds see a ray of hope in their tequila sunrises: Former state attorney general and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell proposed privatizing the whole mess in a press conference yesterday, conducted (seriously!) in a parking garage.
The idea is win-win. End 75 years of incompetent state alcohol sales management and the state gets a bunch of cash for transportation spending when it sells off the rights to run a private liquor store.
In case you’re waffling on whether this is a good idea, go spend 5 minutes on Virginia’s weirdly self-congratulatory booze biz website. Historic photos celebrate milestones. Like 1970, when the first lady clerk, Betty Wilson, was hired. Thank goodness government was running that rum, how would we have achieved gender equality otherwise? (Note: I think the guy in my local liquor store in nearby Alexandria is still wearing her coat.) Lady boozemongers were an innovation that appeared just a couple of years after Virginia started licensing sales of “liquor by the drink” in bars.
In its early history, Virginia ABC agents were also enforcers of anti-bootlegging and moonshining laws, allowing the government run stores to deal very effectively with private competition.
Don’t need no stinkin’ bans!
Chad Wilcox sends in a blog post noticing that bars and restaurants in Arlington, VA (where I lived for most of the past five years) are trending smokefree in the absence of legislation:
They said Arlington’s bars would never voluntarily go smoke-free … then Liberty Tavern did and places like Eleventh, Union Jacks, and Clarendon Grill soon followed.
They said sports bars would never go smoke-free … then Summers created a separate smoke-free bar, followed by Four Courts and Crystal City Sports Pub, and Thirsty Bernie’s opened entirely smoke-free.
Now Arlington’s best diner, Bob & Edith’s at Columbia Pike & S. Wayne St., is going 100% smoke-free.
Arlington makes an interesting test case. It’s one of the wealthiest, most liberal cities in the country, and residents would surely approve a smoking ban if they were allowed to. Fortunately they’re restrained by Virginia law that forbids local anti-smoking ordinances to exceed the state’s own rules. Every year a statewide ban is introduced in the senate and immediately shot down by the tobacco-friendly house.
The fact that popular bars and established restaurants are voluntarily choosing to restrict smoking shows that ban opponents have been right all along: given demand for smokefree environments, profit-seeking business owners will eventually provide them, if not as immediately as a legislative ban would. And as someone who generally prefers bars with clean air, I think that’s fantastic — as long as dive bars like Jay’s or the backroom cigar lounge at EatBar remain free to set their own policies too.
The same has been true in my new home of Portland, OR, another city one might have expected to institute a smoking ban long ago. Even before the statewide ban went into effect last week I noticed there were far more smokefree bars here than in other places I’ve lived. I checked the directory at SmokeFreeOregon.com and the site listed more than 400 establishments within the city limits. That was hardly a lack of choice for non-smokers.
At best, one could make the case for nudging businesses to go smokefree with one-time tax breaks to speed up adoption of the policy. Otherwise, leave people free to associate on their own terms and they’ll eventually figure out ways to accommodate each other. There’s no need for coercion.
Response to comments 1/10/09: Several people note in the comments that this trend has been accelerated by bans in other jurisdictions changing people’s expectations. I have no doubt that this is true. But that makes the case for a ban in Virginia weaker, not stronger. And the same is true for DC. Now that residents have had several years of smokefree bars, the city should lift the ban; there will be many fewer bars that revert to allowing smoking than there were prior to it.
The main point to take away from this is that comprehensive smoking bans are overkill. Softer policies can encourage the development of smokefree markets while still respecting the rights of business owners and smokers, who happen to be people too.
For another post about why I think that demand for smokefree bars is politically overstated, see here.
