Liquor laws don't keep companies out. They may have to change what they do and remove some offerings, but they simply flat out dont KEEP them from coming. Aldi and Whole Foods both normally offer wine. Costco is no different. Not that they were a good business model, but Williams flat out didn't sell alcohol at all. And if you were to go check out Creat/WalMart, how much do you thing the beer aisle makes them? I bet it's not much compared to the rest of the store.
There are some inventive ways of doing the whole thing, but that doesn't mean they want to spend the money on it. Look at Aldi, just as an example. Don't read too much into it or try to just make crazy stretch from it. It could just as easily be Crest or Homeland. Aldi has enough parking on their store plots to add a liquor "room" with a seperate entrance/register/etc. Aldi Stoer Liquor #12345. If WalMart/Crest REALLY wanted to sell liqour and not just beer type drinks, one of those small storefronts at the front of the store could EASILY be leased out to a subsidiary. Liqour of Walmart Sore #12345, Liqour of Walmart Store 12346, etc.
I'm not going to pretend to know the ins and outs of the laws, my (probably overly simplisitc) point here is that there are ways to make this work. But there are a great many factors to it that currently make it cost prohibitive. Things like the distance to the nearest park/school/etc.
But all of these stores sell this stuff in other states but it hasn't kept the stores from coming to Oklahoma. If Costo wants to come here, they'll simply do it withouth liqour. That's really the point of my post, granted it's a bit long-winded. All i'm saying is that the liquor laws don't really "keep stores out of the state", even though i think the liqour laws here are a bunch of total B.S.
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