Legislature debates bill to allow alcohol sales in Florida grocery stores

TALLAHASSEE -- A push is under way in Tallahassee to allow customers to buy liquor at the grocery store. Florida law only allows supermarkets to sell beer and wine.

On Wednesday, a powerful Senate committee opened debate on a bill that would wipe out the 80-year-old law requiring liquor sales to take place in stand-alone stores.

It's a top priority for grocery stores, but Mike Raynor, who has owned Mike's Liquor and Beer Barn in Tallahassee for more than a decade, said they don't have the experience to sell bourbon along with their bread.

"We have to have a knowledge of alcohol, what you mix it with, what it tastes like," he said. "Not only myself, but my employees. We employ 20 people and you've got to really know your business or you won't be in business."

At shopping centers up and down the state, it's become common to see a grocery store on one end with a liquor store on the other. In most of those cases, the liquor store is independently owned. A license to operate can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and tearing down the wall could very well tear down their business model.

Not only could all of those licenses lose a lot of their value, but liquor store owners warn the wide open spaces in grocery stores could make it easier for minors to make off with the hard stuff without ever being caught.

If anything, the bill's backers argue there would be more controls over liquor sales, not fewer.

There's also the convenience factor. Raynor agrees picking up a bottle of cognac along with a head of cabbage could save shoppers a lot of time, but would come at the cost of the jobs his employees depend on to pay their bills.

"We just can't...we can't compete with them," he said.

Florida's stand-alone liquor store law was passed in the wake of Prohibition as a way of discouraging alcoholism.

This story was originally published March 18, 2015 at 10:01 PM with the headline "Legislature debates bill to allow alcohol sales in Florida grocery stores."