The Bar Towel

atomeyes wrote: ask Carlo at De Struise what he thinks about the LCBO...same with the gents at Cantillon.

i can go down a list of the world's best brewers and all will express frustration when it comes to dealing with the LCBO bureaucracy. on one hand, its like winning a lottery when the LCBO picks your product to be listed. on the other hand, an open market would (hopefully) allow smaller breweries to have a greater ability to make their products available and to prosper.

our current system's turned us into beggars and scoundrels. Here we are, on Bartowel, with a Private Order board, begging to somehow get a bottle of Pannepot or Saison Dupont. and we likely won't get it. we have to buy cases from private distributors and split it amongst ourselves just to taste beer that we desire to drink. we fill suitcases with beer when we travel to Montreal or Buffalo or Vancouver. we don't do this with cheese, we don't do this with cars and we don't do this with perfume.

i am a consumer and i want the right to consume. i do not want a government agency choosing for me what it is that I can consume.

Ironically this is a better manifesto on "why our system doesn't work" than the article cited in this thread.

sprague11 wrote: I've always feared that the LCBO getting offloaded would result in another beer-store scenario - Big producers owning the whole show and the little guys getting squeezed out of the market in favour of horse piss for frat boys and rednecks.

With due respect, only Ontarians seem to have this defeatist mentality. You can tell the Controllers have successfully brainwashed all of us when even beer geeks and importers disregard the fact that mixed and private systems have been implemented in several other provinces and are working quite well. Instead we just come up with theoretical reasons as to why a civilized system would never work here (i.e. reiterating government/LCBO propaganda, citing NAFTA clauses, etc). IMO reform will always be unlikely if the very people who should be advocating for change have convinced themselves that a better system isn't possible.

You may call it defeatist, but if I'm working for molson, Labatts, Seagrams or whomever, if the LCBO gets sold off I'm throwing the farm in to buy up as much of that business as I can. Why wouldn't I? Easier to sell to a captive audience - The Beer Store is maybe the best example of this in North America.

I think in the long term, the best we'll see is a system similar to Quebec.

cratez wrote:With due respect, only Ontarians seem to have this defeatist mentality. You can tell the Controllers have successfully brainwashed all of us when even beer geeks and importers disregard the fact that mixed and private systems have been implemented in several other provinces and are working quite well. Instead we just come up with theoretical reasons as to why a civilized system would never work here (i.e. reiterating government/LCBO propaganda, citing NAFTA clauses, etc). IMO reform will always be unlikely if the very people who should be advocating for change have convinced themselves that a better system isn't possible.

I think that recently the LCBO has been doing some good work getting good beer onto shelves, and that change in the last few years has been more exponential that it's ever been. And I think there's a lot of great folks at the LCBO (both at Headquareters and on the "front lines") who care deeply about quality products on shelves.

One of the things that's irked me though is this "it's better than it used to be" attitude. While I'm sure that's true, I'm sure you could say that almost every year - to the point where it's almost like saying - "Look how far we've come since 1927" which is, well, kind of sad.

No we don't want another Beer Store monopoly, but I'm sure there's some middle ground between the "private monopoly" and "public monopoly" extremes (and isn't that what we currently have?) that may help people get better access to different kinds of liquour, however imperfect it still may be.

I think that sometimes people dismiss alternatives and different models, because they (justifiably) see flaws. Even though no system is going to be perfect.

The question is, has the time for reform already passed? Especially with craft beer (and artisanal wine and spirits) sales increasing at around 40% a year! In this ecomony, Dalton's looking toward the BO for revenue, not to add competition into the mix.