Amazon is Not Bigger Than the Law

At Wine-Searcher, we support the delivery of wine and spirits. Of course we do: helping people find wine to order online is what we do. When Amazon decided to join the business, we thought, bully for them.

But Amazon should follow the law, like every small mom-and-pop liquor shop.

California's law that requires companies that make wine and spirits deliveries to have a brick-and-mortar location would seem to have been written specifically to prevent a big company from monopolizing the liquor-delivery business. A company with a warehouse and no retail storefront has better efficiency and can charge lower prices, undercutting the competition.

A retail liquor store open to the public must have disabled access for customers, and it must accept cash payments from people who don't have credit cards or who want to be anonymous. It must hire cashiers and store clerks. It must protect against shoplifting and clean up incidents of vandalism. These things go into the cost of doing business for mom-and-pop liquor stores; Amazon can avoid these costs if it has no retail store location.

Amazon's low wine and whiskey prices from its warehouses are a competitive threat to family-owned stores. You can make an argument about whether using convenience and low prices to drive customers to the most ordinary wines – because Amazon's selection of wines from its warehouse is uninspired – is good for society. We believe in free choice at Wine-Searcher; we're not going to make that argument.

Instead, we must make an argument we spend most of our time resenting.

A look at the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) official page of potential penalties for license shows the department's priorities. The top two things ABC seems to want to prevent are selling liquor to minors, and selling liquor to intoxicated people.

The exception to this is a violation Amazon might have committed – filing a license application with false information – which has the most severe potential penalty of all, license revocation. But, if a company lies to get its license, how can it be trusted to tell the truth about anything?

If Amazon cannot tell the truth about something so basic as whether or not it has a retail store, can it be trusted to ensure that its non-employee Flex delivery "partners" don't deliver whiskey to minors?

We do not believe that minors attempt to order wine very often; we do believe that they almost never successfully receive wine deliveries. There are easier ways to get alcohol. And the major delivery companies – FedEx and UPS – require an adult signature from liquor recipients. The system works well to keep liquor out of the hands of minors if businesses are honest. High delivery prices also act as a deterrent.

Now Amazon comes into the mix offering free two-hour delivery of wine and liquor, specializing in the low end. Adolescents probably don't spend a lot of time scheming about how to get whiskey delivered from a liquor store. But it's not hard to see how they might use Prime Now, especially if their parents already use it to get their groceries delivered. Who would notice?

Can the state trust Amazon to enforce California's liquor laws when Amazon doesn't follow those laws itself?

A big company like Amazon should not be able to come into a state and blatantly ignore its laws. It should not be able to agree to terms of a license and then simply ignore those terms, and maybe get a slap on the wrist if it gets caught.

Amazon is not running the state of California. Yet.