An Exercise In Futility

I visited the BC Government Liquor Store at Terminal Park in Nanaimo the other day. This one has probably the best selection in town and is open fairly late, so it is really the liquor store of choice. However, as long as i can remember, they have not offered any chilled beer. In fact, no BCL store offers this “feature”. The Terminal Park store was recently renovated so i expected that they would have added coolers, it seemed like the logical thing to do. But no, the brand-new looking store still had no cold anything. So i asked someone working there, “is there a law against BCL refrigerating their beer?”. The answer is as stupid as you would expect: The lobby group for private liquor stores fought this a long time ago and won - their argument is that “cold” is what makes the private stores more unique. That my friends is bull shit. What makes a private store unique is that it is open when the government stores are not. I guess what also makes the private stores unique is that they generally charge more for their alcohol (plus cooling fee if you grab it from the cooler). Maybe if ‘cold beer’ is the defining factor for the private stores, we could lobby for them to be barred from selling non-chilled beer? That would be awesome, i guess it is unfortunate that there are more important battles to be fought.