November 11, 2015 01:58 PM UTC

Poll: Whither To Buy Your Beer and Wine?

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Your Choice Colorado campaign kicked off last month, hoping to bypass the gridlocked Colorado General Assembly and take a question directly to voters next year to overturn one of Colorado’s last remaining Prohibition holdovers–the requirement that all alcoholic beverages over 3.2% alcohol content be sold in standalone liquor stores. As the Denver Post reports:

A coalition led by retail powerhouses is drafting ballot language to give Colorado voters a chance to decide whether to change Prohibition-era laws and allow full-strength beer and wine sales at supermarkets.

The effort — backed by King Soopers, Safeway and Walmart — is the most substantial push in recent years to expand sales outside liquor stores in one of the nation’s top states for beer.

A direct appeal to voters with a ballot initiative would come after years of gridlock at the General Assembly, where entrenched special interests battled in what lawmakers dubbed a “beer war.”

It’s a bit paradoxical that Colorado, one of the nation’s foremost craft brewing states, does not allow that marquee product to be sold in grocery stores as 42 states already do. On the other hand, small liquor store owners say they do just fine meeting the market’s demand for convenient alcohol sales, and that the effect of allowing full-strength beer in grocery stores will be directly measurable in lost jobs and closed small businesses. We’ve seen conflicting reports as to whether hard liquor would be included in the proposal from grocery stores, but that could be a big factor for existing liquor stores as well.

What say you, Polsters? Vote whether you would support a ballot question legalizing full-strength beer and wine, and/or hard liquor after the jump. As consumers (generally) without a dog in the fight, we’re curious to know what our readers think about an idea that presumably lots of money is about to get thrown at from both sides.