shintriad wrote:I see what you're getting at, but do you just mean the cost of delivering goods only when a customer requests it? Or transporting liquor in general?
I meant generally.
Presumably, they could ship the "luxury" microbrews at the same time as the rest of the order, and distribute it according to perceived demand. This shouldn't cost the LCBO any more than it would if they only shipped Budweiser from the get-go.
Huh? Sure it does. Shipping more stuff costs more. I understand that the marginal cost might be small, given the huge amount of swill that's getting shipped around, but there's still a cost.
Regardless, my point was that
everything the LCBO is selling is a luxury good (even the swill), and the transportation costs shouldn't be redistributed in even pricing across the province.
Now, if you mean moving things from store to store, it's possible that they're smart enough to only tack on shipments when they're already sending a fleet over, so it might cost the province nothing more to fulfill these orders. You could also presume that, hey, a sale is a sale, and if someone in Timmins wants to order something that's not selling on Bay St., it's worthwhile to give them that free shipping.
Sure, although that only works if it's not selling on Bay St. Probably, most of the stuff that gets sent up north using this kind of system would get sold in Toronto regardless.
Finally, you assume that it's only rural stores that require special orders, when this need not be the case. There are many very dense pockets of the city that have no access to certain craft beers or specialty liquors. Likewise, there always seem to be certain stores in more remote parts of the GTA and environs that have that one item you're looking for — you want Zwack's Vilmos Pear Brandy (for some reason)? Your only hope is to go to Oshawa or Whitby. Not a drop to be found downtown.
Hell, I live relatively close to Cooper St. and I still find myself hightailing it Summerhill or even Bayview Village just to ensure I get the latest batch of micros. It's a pretty sad state of affairs.
Maybe. That's essentially a different argument though.
What I'm talking about is the use of a crown corporation to redistribute the costs of supplying a luxury good in remote areas of the porvince to all consumers of the good.
What your last point addresses is just a supply chain issue in the LCBO. Presumably, they have some kind of reasonable process for determining which stores will stock which SKUs. They probably look at demographics, past sales, shelf space, etc. As we all know, they're not particularly good at this, at least for some beer, which ends up sitting on the shelf in stores where it doesn't get bought up. However, they have a huge number of SKUs and they probably know what they're doing - even if we don't like them, at the end of the day they're a pretty sophisticated retailer.
-Josh
