HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Starting early next year, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), the state agency that controls the sale of wine and spirits, will begin revamping its 621 stores, hoping to erase their decades-old image as dingy, poorly run operations that are a necessary stop on the way to buying a bottle of wine, reported The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The stores will get everything from a new name and design logo on the outside to a new layout on the inside, said the report. The LCB is calling it a total "rebranding" and has hired an outside consultant for roughly $3 million over [image-nocss] two years to help with the makeover.
"This all started because we asked our customers what they liked about our stores and what they didn't like," PLCB chairman Patrick J. "P.J." Stapleton III told the newspaper.
That survey, conducted last year, revealed the agency had an image problem. Stapleton said shoppers did not know what to expect from one store to another. Some had a good selection of wines and an interesting look; others were small, cramped and staffed with workers who were not knowledgeable or particularly helpful.
A customer typically spent only eight minutes in a state store, said Stapleton. And shoppers in urban and suburban areas, like the Philadelphia region, were the ones who were most dissatisfied. "We realized we had to do something," said Stapleton.
The PLCB will pay San Francisco-based Landor Associates between $3 million and $3.7 million to recommend ways to revamp the stores so that customers spend more time and feel more comfortable in them, the report said.
In addition to the new name, the stores' layout will be changed to make wines and spirits easier to find. Store clerks will be schooled in the finer points of wine selection so they can recommend bottles. Ditto for spirits. And customers will be encouraged to sample new wines and spirits depending on the foods they are eating or recipes they are trying. Beyond that, Stapleton would not give any more detail yesterday about the makeover. He would not even reveal his favorite picks for names for the stores. Most now are called Wine & Spirits Stores or Wine & Spirits Shoppes.
Stapleton did say that customers should start seeing changes in some stores in the first half of next year.
Not everyone believes the LCB's makeover will translate into contented customers. Former LCB chairman Jonathan Newman called sprucing up stores "only one piece of the puzzle." He said the LCB needed to work on making its prices more competitive, particularly because wine and spirits in Pennsylvania are heavily taxed—a 6% sales tax and an 18% "emergency" tax—on top of the 30% LCB markup that customers pay.
"More cosmetic changes, like changing signs and names, are creative but don't address that more fundamental problem of competitive pricing," Newman, who resigned from the Liquor Control Board early last year and has launched a private company supplying out-of-state wine retailers with discounted wines, told the paper.
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