Off-year elections tend to have pretty low turnout.
Early results:
Ohio rejects the collective bargaining limits law.
Mississippi rejects the anti-abortion initiative.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor got himself a second term.
Does this beckon hope for progressives?
Sadly, it looks like Costco will successfully buy itself the Washington State liqour industry by initiative.
I hope not since I voted against it, but it’s not a clear-cut issue. Take Costco’s involvement out and you can make the argument that it makes sense with the limits involved. Though it was crazy how much money was spent on it.
Yeah, my chief complaint is that Costco has for what, three elections decided to flood the state with money to increase its profit margin. It’s completely shameless.
Costco makes my life better every day, I trust them far more than I trust government or other companies since they earned that trust. I am thrilled that they won.
The state Senator in Arizona who wrote their creepy immigration bill was successfully recalled as well.
Sunday alcohol sales have finally passed in the vast majority of metro Atlanta, after Gov. Deal allowed the legislature to pass a bill giving constituencies the right to decide whether to have a vote on the issue or not.
Good. This prohibition-era liquor distribution bullshit needs to DIAFF.
Me too. State run liquor stores are retarded, and I’m perfectly okay with Costco fronting the money to make my life better.
Also, it’s not like it lost in a land slide last time around - it was narrowly defeated 53-47. And that was with a competing measure on the ballot from alcohol distibutors that muddled the issue.
The liquor and wine distributors have to be pissed. This repeal allows distilleries and wineries to sell directly to retailers, cutting out the middle-man. Not sure why anyone would be opposed to that, other than the distributors themselves, obviously.
That’s what I mean. The last bill was honest - privatize the liquor business. This one was a total profit fight between distributors and retailers; we’re going down the road to CA’s stupid initiatives.
In positive news, Eyman’s latest was rejected. That didn’t have fi’n 22 million spent on it.
Well I still voted against it because the one thing the “anti” folks got right (though they grossly exagerrated it) is that grocery stores are not going to do as good a job with age enforcement as the state run liquor stores. And I say that as someone who took full advantage of how bad grocery stores are at keeping beer out of the hands of underage buyers when I was underage. So there is that.
The rest of the proposal made sense.
Grocery stores are just fine at it. Hell, they still card me at the store when I buy beer, it’s automatically built into the checkout software.
I get carded far more often at the grocery store buying beer than I do at the state-run liquor store. In fact, I’ve never been carded at the liquor store.
Yah, that sounds like a reasonable objection, except you can buy liquor at any grocery or liquor store in California and we have a lower underage drinking rate than Washington.
http://www.samhsa.gov/data/2k6/stateUnderageDrinking/underageDrinking.htm
Sure, but minimum wage cashiers are neither trained as well nor have the experience the much more highly paid state liquor store clerks were. That’s all I’m saying. When I was in college we hit the grocery stores all the time with our fake IDs, but nobody ever thought of trying that at the state liquor stores. If you wanted the hard stuff you got someone of legal age to buy it for you.
Note that I don’t think Costco itself will have issues either. But there are still a lot of places (Walmart, the grocery chains) where the standards are just not as good.
In the overall scheme of things the increase in sales to the wrong people may not be huge. But I personally didn’t care enough about the increased convenience (and most reports said the costs wouldn’t be notably different) to risk an increase of sales of the harder stuff to minors.
Any retail store with computerized registers should automatically remind cashiers to check age. It shouldn’t be a huge issue. All you have to do is make the penalties for selling to underage buyers severe. No store wants to lose its liquor license.
Why not let state run sellers compete with private stores? If you’re worried about Costco threaten to suspend their license on a state-wide basis and see how diligent they become.
I was mostly concerned with making sure that any change to the liquor laws ended up being revenue-neutral for the state. But it ain’t my problem now.
You guys moving?
Yeah, we’re in Austin now.