Your comparison of selling hard alcohol in grocery stores to self-service gas stations is spot on, but in a whole different way.

Neither is placed on the ballot to make my life more convenient, but instead has everything to do with money! The change to alcohol sales will always be advocated by those that will dig just a little further into all of our pockets. Big Booze gains, as they can spend their money to push their products, and Big Food and their counterpart Big Wholesale simply want to increase their bottom line with more sales of anything. And, as usual, Big Government will find a way to manipulate the change to dig just a little more tax out of our pockets.

Details schme-tails, it always looks good on paper and is pushed that way by the advocates of such change. Looking north to Washington state’s experience shows that the real truth of such a changes comes at the cash register, where a bottle of booze is generally twice the price than it is in Oregon. It is not hard to know, it is simple: It is just another attempt to take the money out of our pockets and put it in theirs.

The change to the law to allow hard alcohol sales in grocery stores should never, and I mean never, make the ballot, ever.

Carl Culham

Athena