Letter: New liquor study doesn't tell whole story

Talk about it

I read the story about the study under way to see the city would be better served with a new liquor store location. We are really good at paying for studies, but I wonder why we pay so much for them when the results are so unsupportable.

The study results indicated the city is missing out on $3.5 million in liquor sales over a five-year period because the current location does not capitalize on the tourist/traveler traffic that moves through our city.

I did a little calculation on my own. If there are 365 days in a year and the city liquor store is closed Sundays, that leaves 313 business days. If you calculate that this same store is closed for Christmas Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and the Fourth of July, this now leaves 308 business days.

If you are going to add $3.5 million in sales over 1,540 business days, then you would need $2,272.73 of additional sales every working day. If a case of beer cost $20 and every person who stepped through the door bought one, that would mean that you need 114 more people to stop each and every day of the year to make the additional $2,272.73 per day in order to sell an additional $3.5 million of liquor over a five-year period.

Who really thinks that a new liquor store location would generate 114 new additional daily customers spending $20 each and doing so every day in addition to the current level of business? I, for one do not, nor do any of the other citizens of Worthington that I have talked to. This does not even begin to take into account the cost of the new building, which the city could not construct for less than $3 million, that has to be cash-flowed into the equation as well.

If they decided to toss the $3 million in the hat from the hospital sale proceeds and wanted to use liquor sales over a 10-year period to theoretically cash-flow it like any private business would have to, that would take an additional $974.03 in additional sales every day — or an additional 49 customers added to the 116 already figured totally 165 additional customers every day to meet the study’s unattainable sales projections and cash-flow this taxpayer expenditure. I am sure that the $3 million would just get shuffled in with no consideration for what else it might be used for. By the way, this assumes the cost of the liquor to be zero, which we all know it’s not.

The number of new customers needed would likely quadruple when you figure in the cost of the liquor actually sold. This is another bad idea that would be funded by taxpayers, and it has about the same chance of success as the study that said that three of every 10 travelers that pass Worthington on Interstate 90 would stop to see the Big Red Barn. For the common taxpayer, fancy studies mean very little.

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