Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2019

An excellent illustration of market segmentation

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Wikipedia entry for “market segmentation” defines it this way:

“BEER”by Jonnee is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Market segmentation is the activity of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics. In dividing or segmenting markets, researchers typically look for common characteristics such as shared needs, common interests, similar lifestyles or even similar demographic profiles.

No single product is going to be universally popular, and it’s generally a bad idea to present it that way. The producers of a new product ideally try to identify the groups of potential customers who are more likely to want to buy the new product, and tailor their advertising to those groups. The more accurately they can identify and communicate with these customer groups, the greater the chances that the product will be a success in the market.

Beer isn’t universally popular (Gasp! Shock! Horror!), so brewers try to identify different kinds of beer drinkers and market their brews to those sub-groups:

The point about a market being that you can put your stuff out there and see who buys it. The buyers will – they are rational beings after all – select from the varied offerings and their selections will be the ones which best increase their utility by their own measurements of that utility. Thus the Shagmenowbigboypint might get a bit more business toward closing time, who knows? Not necessarily entirely female business either.

And even to stop being puerile about it. We’ve only this one system that does provide multiple choices – that’s what a market is. But in order for ever finer meeting of utility it’s necessary for ever finer slices of the market to be addressed. That is, we need to have free market entry so we can find out what it is that actually meets peoples’ desires.

Banning something that appeals to some slice of that market is thus defeating the point and object of that very market’s existence. Sure, lots of women won’t buy a sexist beer. Some will, as will some men. The aim and art of the whole exercise being to allow those who won’t not to, those who will to.

Or, as we can put it, every beer being Shagmenowbigboypint is as bad as no beer being Shagmenowbigboypint.

December 13, 2018

When Democrats Loved Deregulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 12 Dec 2018

Left-leaning politicians of the 1970s understood that red tape punishes consumers and protects big business. The leading deregulator of that era was none other than Jimmy Carter.

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When President Donald Trump bragged in his first State of the Union address about cutting red tape, the Democratic response was no surprise. “Deregulation,” warned Center for American Progress Senior Advisor Sam Berger in Fortune, “is simply a code word for letting big businesses cut corners at everyone else’s expense.”

But many leading Democrats had the opposite view in the 1970s. Then, at the dawn of the deregulation era, left-leaning politicians and economists understood that excessive government management of industry let the big-business incumbents get away with lousy performance at the expense of competitors, taxpayers, and consumers. The leading figure in that fight to cut red tape and shut down entire federal agencies was none other than Jimmy Carter.

It was Sen. Ted Kennedy who held extensive Senate hearings in the early ’70s, with testimony from the likes of Ralph Nader and liberal economist Alfred Kahn, about the benefits of lifting state controls on the airline industry. The resulting Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, signed by Carter, killed the Civil Aeronautics Board — a federal agency that decided which airlines could fly where, and even what they could charge. The new competition to the old airline cartel reduced fares, expanded destinations, increased safety, and made air travel an option for those of us who aren’t rich.

Carter also lifted stifling government oversight of the rail and trucking industries under a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. The result? Competition intensified, prices dropped, and consumers saved more money on everyday products.

In 1978, President Carter signed a bill that lifted Prohibition-era criminal restrictions on home brewing. The legalization of do-it-yourself beer production unleashed a boom of experimentation, paving the way for the craft beer revolution that is ongoing to this day. The year that Carter loosened the rules, the U.S. was home to a mere 50 breweries. Today there are well over 5,000. In two generations of beermaking, America went from global laughingstock to world leader.

The governor of California during Carter’s presidency was none other than Jerry Brown, then known as “Governor Moonbeam” for his far-out musings, glittery social life, and lefty politics. Yet Brown, too, could be a fiery skeptic of government. In his terrific second inaugural address in 1979, Brown stated that “many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices.”

But even while some sectors were unleashed four decades ago by far-seeing Democrats and Republicans alike, too many governments at the local, state, and federal levels have forgotten those lessons, and instead imposed entirely new categories of regulations. Occupational licensing, which applied to about one in 10 jobs 40 years ago, now impacts one in three.

So how did the party of Jimmy Carter and sideburns-era Jerry Brown become the ideological home of Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? One explanation may be that Democratic support for deregulation back then was born out of a sense of nearly hopeless desperation in the face of stagflation. Cutting red tape to foster dynamism was about the last move politicians had left.

Our long economic expansion and stock-market boom will soon come to an end, imposing limits on government precisely at the moment when it’s asked to do more. When that day of reckoning comes, the best questions for lawmakers of both parties to ask may just be: What would Jimmy Carter do?

Photo credits: Jimmy Carter Library, Arthur Grace/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/Newscom, Everett Collection/Newscom, Ron Sachs/CNP/MEGA/Newscom, Brian F. Alpert/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Paul Harris/Pacific Coast Nes/Newscom, Bee Staff Photo/ZUMA Press/Newscom, Dennis Brack/bb51/Newscom, Jonathan Bachman/REUTERS/Newscom, Rick Friedman/Polaris/Newscom

November 20, 2018

QotD: Why do we drink?

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.

Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spiritual insight, but that’s not enough to explain its universality in the ancient world. People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare — it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.

What’s more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.

[…]

Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities — for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”

Andrew Curry, “Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze”, National Geographic, 2017-02.

November 18, 2018

Ironically, Pabst may be forced to start brewing its own beers

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve never had a PBR, so maybe all those hipster poseurs really do like the stuff, but their favourite ironic drink may be in danger, as Pabst is suing MillerCoors to force them to keep brewing the stuff for Pabst:

A Wisconsin courtroom was the setting this week for a lawsuit pitting some of the biggest names in watery American beer against each other. The case pits “hipster favorite” Pabst, parent of PBR, against the much larger MillerCoors, which Pabst claims wants “to put it out of business.”

Earlier this year, Pabst sued MillerCoors, alleging MillerCoors has engaged in “breach of contract, breach of anti-competition laws, fraud, and misrepresentation.” The companies’ currently have an agreement in which MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beer brands. That agreement is about to end, and MillerCoors seems ambivalent about renewing the contract. Pabst has asked the Wisconsin court to award it $400 million in damages and to force MillerCoors to renew the contract.

The case, which is being heard in state court in Milwaukee, could decide the future of Pabst’s entire portfolio of beers, from PBR to Old Milwaukee, Lone Star, Old Style, Colt 45, Natty Bo, Rainier, Schlitz, Olympia, Stroh’s, Schaefer, Schmidt’s, Pearl, and Blatz.

MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beers under a 1999 contract—a type of agreement known in the industry as contract brewing—that is set to expire in 2020. That contract contemplated two potential five-year renewals. MillerCoors argues the company should be free to determine whether to renew the contract, while Pabst alleges “that the two need to find a solution together if Pabst wants to continue the agreement.” Pabst also insists MillerCoors has a good-faith obligation to negotiate a renewal.

MillerCoors hasn’t foreclosed on continuing its partnership with Pabst. For example, it’s considered selling its Irwindale, California, facility to Pabst, or continuing to brew Pabst’s beers there at a much higher cost.

Pabst insists the only way the company can continue to exist is if MillerCoors, which is owned by Molson Coors, continues to produce its beers under contract at a cost Pabst finds fair. That may be true. Pabst doesn’t brew beer, and AB InBev, which owns industry leader Budweiser and which is likely the only other brewer large enough to produce the full Pabst line, forswears the contract-brewing model.

As Tim Worstall put it earlier this week: “Basically, and not accurately, Pabst books the advertising space and MillerCoors does everything else. And given that it’s the brand bit of brewing that makes the money, not the brewing bit, why would you continue such an arrangement if you didn’t have to?”

As Iowahawk put it, “Oh cripes when will I ever learn not to trigger the Beer Snobs”:

October 20, 2018

Barley, beer, and climate change

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There was a “study” recently released proclaiming the end of beer … or at least a huge hike in beer prices coupled with a drop in availability due to climate change. Tim Worstall explains why the report is — at best — misleading:

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) at the United States National Arboretum.
Photo by Flikr user “Cliff” via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ll have seen the various reports over the past few days that climate change is going to do terrible damage to the beer industry. The mechanism is that drought and heat will reduce the barley yield, this will then reduce the amount of beer that can be made. What follows is the explanation from the actual researchers of what they’ve done. It is, to put it mildly, nonsense. For their assumptions are wrong. Let us say that climate change does reduce barley yields on those lands currently planted to it. But we do know that as this happens then other, more polar, regions open up to being suitable for the growing of barley. So the initial worry is just untrue.

They then go on to insist that we’ll feed the cows on the barley that’s left rather than make beer from it. Thus the shortfall in beer is greater than that in barley. Nonsense upon stilts. Humans don’t work that way. We started this agriculture thing because we wanted the beer after all. Feeding the animals came later – and often enough the cows are fed on the barley after we’ve made the beer from it anyway. We’d put our minimal supply into booze not beasts.

Finally, they tells us that Irish beer prices would double. No, really, given the level of taxes there upon the stuff it’s really not true that even their 30% reduction in barley supply is going to double the price.

September 28, 2018

QotD: “Lite” beers

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Then there was the fellow who sent an unlabelled jar of Bud Lite to a laboratory for analysis. A week later he received their report: ‘Dear Sir, we regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes’.

David Warren, “On beer consumption”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-07.

August 31, 2018

Farewell, buck-a-beer publicity stunt, we hardly knew ye

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the all-too-brief publicity stunt of cheaper beer for Ontario:

President’s Choice is ending its buck-a-beer promotion on Sept. 3, just days after it started: We get one week, one long weekend and then out of the pool, party’s over, back to class. PC-branded beer will rocket back up to $1.38 a bottle when you buy 24 at The Beer Store or $1.65 when you buy 12, which highlights just how steep — and presumably unsustainable — the discount really was. We shall see how long the two other participating breweries’ offers last, but they made it quite clear, as did PC, that this was a limited-time offer prompted by Doug Ford’s most shamelessly blunt populist pledge.

My goodness, though, what a commotion it will leave in its wake. Some brewers quite understandably took the opportunity to note the impact of aluminum tariffs on their bottom lines, to complain that Ford’s government was playing favourites by giving away expensive product placement in LCBO stores for $1 beer, and to note the government is actually raising taxes on beer.

Others, however, waxed utterly scandalized. “How about buck a pound of steak? Who would eat that?” asked one Toronto brewer who had perhaps not entirely thought through his rhetorical question. “We haven’t even given two thoughts about this,” Great Lakes Brewery’s communications manager, Troy Burtch, told the Toronto Star. “Why would anyone do this?” Burtch and Great Lakes have signalled their total uninterest by tweeting incessantly about it.

The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation went after some of the affronted craft brewers for accepting taxpayer subsidies for their higher-end products. People on social media lined up for and against buck-a-beer, vowing to boycott the participants or those complaining about the program.

The whole thing was a dumb Ford Nation stunt, no question. But good grief. You can hardly blame the breweries, either for participating or for not: they were just trying to wring as much publicity as they could from the situation. No one is really any worse off, or at least not much. What we were really seeing among the chattering classes was a rerun-by-proxy of the June 6 election: to drink Ford’s swill was to vote Ford Nation; to boycott it was to stand bravely against their entire agenda.

June 23, 2018

QotD: The protectionist two-step, Alberta craft-beer variant

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Economic protectionism has two classic rationales. Sometimes, as in the case of Alberta’s clumsy attempt at an interprovincial tariff on craft beer, it is undertaken in the name of defending small, emerging “infant industries” that a government wishes to give time to establish themselves in its territory. And sometimes, as in the case of Canadian dairy supply management, it is done to defend “strategic” industries that have existed forever and that allegedly create an irreplaceable quantity of employment and profits.

Give yourself a gold star if you spotted that these canonical pretexts for trade barriers are contradictory. The inherent promise of protection for “infant industries” is that they will grow up and leave the nest. But, oops: by the time they reach adulthood, they may have become too “strategic” to expose to market forces. Heads, the favoured firms win; tails, the consumer loses.

Of course, on the level of fine detail, the arguments for trade barriers are manifold and complicated. (If you get into a quarrel about dairy, and take the free-trade side, you will find them being changed by your interlocutor every 30 seconds.) Alberta’s program for supporting small brewers has an unclear, touchy-feely small-is-beautiful justification. By design, the tariff applies only to businesses that have no intention of attaining industrial scale. It’s right there in the term “craft brewing,” isn’t it? Whatever the esthetic merits of craft beer, this is surely the deliberate encouragement of what the urbane left likes to calls “precarious” jobs that could be flung into disarray by a bad season, a shift in fashions, or a supply problem.

And, also, it’s illegal.

Colby Cosh, “A court refuses to swallow Alberta’s thinly disguised craft-beer tariff”, National Post, 2018-06-22.

December 17, 2017

Beer Brewing – Roger Casement – Surviving Aces I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 16 Dec 2017

Ask your questions here: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv

November 3, 2017

Why Does American Beer Taste Like Water?

Filed under: Business, Germany, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Good Stuff
Published on 29 Jun 2016

Americans drink 51 Billion Pints of beer every single year. Despite the abundance of craft beers available, the most popular variety is the traditional light American Lager. But why do these mass produced beers taste so watery? And how did they get to be so popular in the first place?

Special Thanks To:
Ray Daniels, and the Cicerone Certification Program
https://www.cicerone.org/

August 23, 2017

QotD: “Beer”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Lager” is an inherently ambiguous word these days. It can mean “wonderful, full-bodied, malty, highly hopped beer aged for weeks,” or it can mean “soap-flavored water for pussies who are frightened by actual beer.” In other words “American beer.”

“Steve H.” Little Tiny Lies, 2004-09-30. Originally posted on the old blog 2004-10-01 (no longer online).

July 31, 2017

Craft brewers are good examples of “evasive entrepreneurs”

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rosemarie Fike explains why craft brewers almost always push tours of their premises and souvenir glasses, mugs, coasters, and T-shirts:

This summer I’ve been enjoying a lot of microbrewery tours — even though the main attraction isn’t the “tour” I pay for, but the free beer that comes with it. In fact, the breweries must know that’s why people come. So why don’t they just drop this tour façade and sell us the beer?

Regardless of which brewery you visit, you pay a mere $10 for a pint glass with the brewery’s logo on it. As a thank you for purchasing the pint glass, they then grant three tickets you can redeem for free “samples” — which are actually full-sized beers.

There are also usually food vendors and live music. This atmosphere combined with the inexpensive libations draw sizeable crowds to these “tours” — where only a handful of patrons actually tour the facility.

But why do the breweries insist upon selling us the pint glasses, when most of us only really want what goes inside?

In conversation with the brewery owners, I learned that the breweries in my town aren’t legally allowed to sell beer directly to consumers in the way a bar can. But there’s nothing in the law preventing them from giving their product away.

In response to those incentives, they sell customers a pint glass (or charge them for the “tour”) and rent some of their property out to food vendors to subsidize the cost of getting their product into the hands of eager consumers without technically charging them for it.

It’s far from an ideal situation for these businesses, but it allows them to introduce new people to their product and to earn some revenue in the process — even if it’s less revenue than they could earn if they were allowed to just sell people the beer. It’s a clever arrangement and a perfect example of evasive entrepreneurship.

July 29, 2017

Things to keep firmly in mind before investing in legalized marijuana markets

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

There will definitely be money to be made as more and more jurisdictions move to legalize marijuana, but it’s not going to be like soup raining down from heaven — it’s not going to be a simple as just grabbing a bucket:

Here are Coyote’s first three rules of business strategy:

  1. If people are entering the business for personal, passionate, non-monetary reasons then the business is likely going to suck. When I say “suck”, I mean there may be revenues and customers and even some profits, but that the returns on investment are going to be bad**. Typically, the supply of products and services and the competitive intensity in an industry will equilibrate over time — if profits are bad, some competitors exit and the supply glut eases. But if people really love the industry and do not want to work anywhere else and get emotional benefits from working there, there always tends to be an oversupply problem. For decades, maybe its whole history, the airline industry was like this. The restaurant industry is this way as well. The brew pub industry is really, really like this — go to any city and check the list of small businesses for sale, and an absurd number will be brew pubs.
  2. If the business is frequently featured in the media as the up and coming place to be and the hot place to work, stay away. Having the media advertising for new entrants is only going to increase the competitive intensity and exacerbate the oversupply problem that every fast-growing industry inevitably faces as it matures.
  3. Beware the lottery effect — One or two people who made fortunes in the business mask the thousands who lost money (Freakonomics had an article on the drug trade positing that it works just this way — while assumes the illegal drug trade makes everyone in it rich, in fact only a few really do so and the vast majority are and always will be grinders making little money for high risk). Even those people who made tons of money in hot businesses sometimes just had good timing to get out at the right time before the reckoning came. Mark Cuban is famous as an internet billionaire, but in fact Broadcast.com, which he sold for over $5 billion to Yahoo, only had revenues in its last independent quarter of about $14 million and was losing money (that’s barely four times larger than my small company).

When I was at Harvard Business School, the first two cases in the first week of strategy class were a really cool high-tech semiconductor fab and a company that makes brass water meters that are sold to utilities. After we had read the cases but before we discussed them, the professor asked us which company we would like to work for. Everyone wanted the tech firm. But as we worked through the cases, it became clear that the semiconductor firm had an almost impossible profitability problem, while Rockwell water meters minted money. I never forgot that lesson — seemingly boring industries could be quite attractive, and this lesson was later hammered home for me as I later was VP of corporate strategy for Emerson Electric, a company that was built around making money from boring but profitable industrial products businesses.

[…]

** You can tell I have classical training in business strategy because my goal is return on investment. One can argue, perhaps snarkily but also somewhat accurately, that there is a new school of thought that does not care about profitability, revenues, or return on investment but on getting larger and larger valuations from private investors based on either user counts or just general buzz. I am entirely unschooled in this modern form of strategy. However, the general strategy of getting someone to overpay for something from you is as old as time. I mentioned Mark Cuban but there are many other examples. Donald Trump seems to have made a lot of money from a related strategy of fleecing his debt holders.

June 26, 2017

“Ah, the Comeau case. Schwisberg says it could change everything – knock down all the barriers”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s ridiculous that 150 years into Confederation, and we still don’t have free trade within Canada:

If you’re on vacation abroad somewhere this summer and find yourself explaining to people over dinner what makes Canada so unique and special, use the story about Gerard Comeau and his beer run back in 2012. There is no more Canadian story than that.

Comeau is a Canadian who, looking for the best bargain he could, drove to a Canadian town a few miles from his home in Canada, bought 14 cases of beer and three bottles of liquor from Canadian beer and liquor stores, then returned to his home. In Canada.

A squad of plainclothes Mounties with binoculars, it turned out, had him under surveillance, according to his lawyer. On his way home from the Canadian town to his Canadian home, he was intercepted and handed a ticket for $292.50 by uniformed Canadian officers who then seized all the alcohol he’d purchased.

His Canadian crime: his beer run had crossed one of Canada’s internal borders. He’d driven from New Brunswick into Quebec. As far as New Brunswick was concerned, that made him a smuggler.

Sixteen other people were charged that day in the same sting operation, but Comeau had more spine than most and fought the ticket. Some smart lawyers from Ontario and Western Canada got involved, and – my god, I love it when things like this happen – he won.

A New Brunswick judge ruled that the province’s law against importing alcohol from other provinces violated the Constitution Act, Sec. 121, which states: All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.

The ruling shocked New Brunswick and most of the other provinces, which consider Sec. 121 to be one of the most horrible and un-Canadian sentences in the Canadian Constitution, something that should be ignored at all costs.

May 12, 2017

“Maybe this is creeping privatization after all. It’s certainly worth a shot”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the neither one thing nor the other state of alcohol retailing in Ontario:

On Tuesday the government enumerated 76 new Ontario supermarkets where, by Canada Day, you will be able to buy beer. That will make a total of 206 Ontario supermarkets where you can buy beer — an artificially limited selection of beer, only in six packs and singles and only during the same bankers’ hours as the LCBO and Beer Store. But still. That’s about one-third as many supermarkets selling beer as there are LCBO outlets selling beer; add in the 212 rural agency stores that sell wine, liquor and beer, and you’ve got almost two-thirds as many private enterprises selling beer as you have government bottle shops.

This could help prove several useful concepts that deserve much wider acceptance in Ontario. One is that it’s very easy for the government to make money off liquor sales without retailing liquor itself. Indeed, it’s easier; that’s why so many governments do it. The supermarkets buy the beer wholesale from the LCBO; the LCBO doesn’t have to worry about paying civil servants to sell that beer or running the stores.

Another is that the private sector can be counted on to keep liquor out of children’s hands. Indeed, with inspections and draconian fines in place, it can probably be trusted more. My observations suggest LCBO employees certainly card everyone who should be carded, but it’s nothing like it is in the U.S. I’m almost 41, not in especially good nick, and I still get asked about half the time.

Might Ontarians develop a taste for all this convenience? The hard cap on beer-in-supermarket licences is 450; having doled them all out, including agency stores, that would mean about half the liquor outlets in Ontario were privately run. And people might start to notice the bizarre inconsistencies: why can the Walmart on Bayfield Street in Barrie sell only beer, and only in six packs, while the Walmart on Hays Boulevard in Oakville can sell beer and wine, and meanwhile Hope’s Foodland in Novar, Mac’s Milk in Craigleith, Redden’s campground in Longbow Lake and Lac des Mille Lacs Bait and Tackle in Upsala can sell beer, wine and hard liquor — and smokes and fireworks and beef jerky and bread and eggs? Why can scores of convenience stores sell everything alcoholic as agency stores, but other convenience stores aren’t even eligible to apply for the new wine and beer licences?

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