The track record for North Carolina’s system for selling liquor is a lot like the driving performance of a guy who’s had too much to drink — it’s all over the place.
On the one hand, North Carolina’s Alcoholic Beverage Control system has an interesting profitability record. The state ranks seventh in the country in total revenue from liquor sales. But North Carolina is 45th in alcohol consumption. It seems we’re paying a lot for what little we drink.
On the other hand, the ABC network is a mess. The state governs the distribution of hard liquor to individual boards, but that’s a big network. There are 150 ABC boards that are run on the local level. That’s 50 more boards than the state has counties. And not all of them are efficient or even profitable.
There are seven different ABC boards in Robeson County alone, for example, to manage eight different stores. As The Charlotte Observer reported last week, two of those boards lost money. Two barely broke even. Others had profits ranging from 3.3 percent to 5 percent.
A legislative commission has recommended abandoning the ABC system in its present form and giving more control of the stores to the state. The state’s first mission, the commission says, should be to make money.
Certainly, a county like Robeson could be managed more effectively through one county ABC board instead of seven. But we would hate to see too much control ceded to Raleigh.
The location and appearance of ABC stores, for example, probably will be managed better by folks who live in the same counties. The last thing anyone wants to see is the kind of seedy liquor stores that fill the inner-cities of states where there is little or no local say in where or how stores are operated.
Perhaps it’s time for the state to offer broad guidelines on the sales of hard liquor, including the number of local boards that can make decisions on location and operation practices.
But the revenue stream for alcohol sales overall suggests the state isn’t hurting too much through the system as it is right now. The N.C. General Assembly would do well to proceed with caution on this issue.
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