Last week I received an email from my local liquor store asking me to oppose a piece of legislation that would hurt their business — possibly enough to put them out of business altogether.

The problem is, I support the legislation. Not because I want something bad to happen to the liquor store; I’ve shopped there for years, the owner and staff are extremely friendly, and they have a very decent selection of wines which is mainly why I go there.

The legislation, if passed, makes it legal for grocery stories to sell full strength beer (currently grocery and convenience stores can sell only 3.2 beer).

In most states, you can buy wine and beer at grocery stores. I love the convenience of being able to pick up a bottle or two of wine along with the rest of my groceries. I’ve always been annoyed that for rather arcane reasons, this isn’t possible in Colorado.

What interests me about this situation is the liquor store’s reasoning. In their letter they said the proposal will negatively impact liquor stores especially stores like theirs which is located next to a major chain store. Why should I oppose the proposal? Because it will hurt small independent stores like theirs.

But the real issue however is misreading what customers value.

In my opinion, giving my support to a business because “they’re nice people” and “they’ve been in business for over 50 years,” is not a good enough reason. It certainly pales to my ability to save time every week when I’m running around town doing errands.

The arguments that buying at the local liquor store helps small businesses and contributes to the local economy is a better argument. But still not enough for me to oppose the legislation.

Bottom line: they get my money if they offer real, unique value to me as a customer. The liquor store can still survive if they can offer something substantially different and appealing from what is offered by the grocery store. It might be a unique wine selection or partnering with liquor distributors and restaurants.

I would feel bad if the store went out of business because I like the owner and staff. But much as a I like them, I’d still rather do it all in one trip than two.

Something we can all learn from.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Customer Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.