Most of you have heard me complain about the bizarre liquor laws in PA. You can only buy hard liquor and wine in state stores that have restricted hours and only a handful of which are open on Sunday. Beer is only sold by the case at Beer Stores, except for at restaurants and bars that have a liquor license which allows them to sell up to 2 six-packs of beer. To skirt the law some small pizzerias and the like have attained restaurant liquor licenses and sold a minimal amount of food and a huge quantity of beer, these places that sell more beer than anything else are affectionately referred to as “Stop and Gos”
So when Bob emailed Michael this week about an article he saw about Vidalia Marketplace, saying it was some kind of beer store I quickly hit Google and found their website. Their website has a beer menu item:
The Rumors are true – as long as you are 21 years old, you can buy beer at Vidalia Market Place!
Gasp! Upon inspection of the website you discover that it’s just a grocery store, but includes an eat-in area, which is probably the key to this in-grocery-store beer shopping – they are a restaurant with a liquor license!
There will be a vast variety of beer available from all over the world! If you have any questions about our beers or you would like us to carry a particular beer, please ask a beer associate for assistance.
Sweet! It’s not rows and rows of Budweiser!
My favorite is this bit: State law requires that we ring your beer purchase at a designated cash register in the beer section. In addition, you may also purchase your food items in the beer section, even if you only shopped for food items at Vidalia. We will always have an open register in the beer section available for your shopping convenience.
Ahahaha the hoops they have to jump through to get away with this.
The same day Bob emailed us (July 3rd) I decided to take a trip down to Lansdale after work to check this place out. I figured that if they were too expensive (as often is the case when you buy beer from restaurants or bars) or had lousy selection I’d just hit the beer store in Skippack for our 4th of July case of beer.
But I wasn’t disappointed! Great selection! Reasonable prices! And I had to take pictures:
A whole aisle of imports, mostly Belgian! Sweet! They had a bunch of lambics I’ve never tried, some Duvels, a bunch of Chimays. Oh yum yum. The aisle facing this one was full of microbrews.
The beer cooler! Lots and lots of 6-packs, plus cases and singles. I managed to take both these pictures while there weren’t people standing in the way, which was a bit of a trick, the beer section was pretty full of people the whole time I was there. And people were talking to each other, saying how great it was that they could buy six packs, how amazed they were at all the beers they’d never heard of. It was amusing and a bit sad – where I grew up this was normal! In spite of having a few amazing breweries, PA is for the most part living in the beer dark ages!
So I grabbed 3 six-packs and went to stand in line to get my beer (remember – only one register can handle beer, and lots of people wanted beer!). So I get up to the cash register and was hit by the “2 six-pack maximum” thing. D’oh. No worries, all I had to do was take two of my six-packs out to my car and come back into the store and buy the third. Absurdity abounds, but that’s what I did. I happily drove home with six-packs of Rogue Dead Guy Ale, Victory Hopdevil and Victory Prima Pils.
Hopefully the popularity of this upscale grocery store will make more stores start doing the same, as a lot of modern grocery stores have eat in areas. Or (dare I hope) start to clue the lawmakers into changing our alcohol laws. This isn’t some dingy Stop and Go in the city, we’re wealthy, high tax paying folks in the suburbs picking up our hummus and beer at a nice store, and this is what we want.