It was the second issue that pulled my interest enough to read the article. I've mentioned the so-called "blue law" in passing before. For the paltry amount of alcohol I consume, not being able to buy it on Sunday has rarely affected me. Still, I think the fact that that kind of "morality" is being legislated to me is total crap. I'm happy that a step was recently taken toward reversing the law (even if there are still more steps to come).
But the last sentence of this news story I just didn't get:
Analysts estimate that Sunday sales could bring Colorado an extra $4 million in taxes in the first year.Now, as I mentioned, I don't drink much alcohol, so maybe I'm missing something here. But since you can't buy your liquor on Sundays here, isn't everybody just buying it on another day? If you're throwing a party on Sunday night, you buy the booze on Saturday. If you drank the last of your vodka or whatever, you go buy a new bottle. Just not on Sunday.
So where the hell are these $4 million in taxes going to come from? Are there that many people refusing to buy alcohol, period, just because they can't on Sunday? Are we to believe they're going to come out of the woodwork if the law changes? Are there millions of dollars' worth of alcohol that for some reason needs drinking in Colorado on Sunday and only Sunday? Alcohol that wouldn't be purchased at all on any other day of the week?
Are these "analysts" by any chance the same people who send me spam telling me not to buy gas on a specific day because they somehow think that's gonna force gas prices to drop?
Can I get a job as one of these analysts? Clearly there isn't much work involved.
2 comments:
I'd wager that, while there is a certain amount of planning that goes into some people's alcohol drinking, enough of it is spur-of-the-moment, "Damn, we just ran out of Bud and I need to get another case" to make it so that additional sales would be generated on Sunday. As you said, some people will just wait until Monday, but that also means less overall alcohol consumed (since they couldn't have any on Sunday) and fewer total sales.
Now, if they have come to the conclusion that six-days-a-week alcohol stores net $24 million in taxes and they're interpreting that as $4 million/day and think that another day will add another $4 million, that's probably wrong. But it's no different than any other business, I'd imagine -- the more you're open, the more money you make.
In high school I worked at a local grocery and you couldn't buy alcohol on Sunday. Well, one year New Years was on a Monday. The last minute shoppers weren't very happy that they couldn't buy any bubbly to celebrate with.
Jared
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