LAVAL, Quebec -- Alain Bouchard, the founder and chairman of Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc., one of Canada's biggest convenience store operators, wants in on a proposed plan to liberalize Ontario's beer and wine sales, and he criticized the province's decades-old system dominated by the Beer Store and Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).
"The Beer Store concept is obsolete," Bouchard told the Business News Network (BNN).
The Beer Store--privately held by brewing giants Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors and Japan's Sapporo--holds 80% market share of Ontario's beer market and has a monopoly on any beer sales in volumes larger than a six-pack.
The Ontario Liberal government wants to introduce full aisles of beer and wine only into select grocery stores, but not in convenience stores.
"Chain convenience stores have more experience selling alcohol than any other private retailer. We do this responsibly, and it's something we're going to keep talking about because it's important to our customers and our industry," the Ontario Convenience Store Association said in a statement provided to BNN.
"It's 2015," said Bouchard. "The convenience store industry will invest massively in stores" if they are allowed to sell beer and wine. "We'd have to enlarge our stores, build new coolers, add people, so it would create jobs locally."
Beer and wine typically make up 10% to 20% of Couche-Tard's of total per-store sales in the regions of Canada where alcohol is permitted to be sold by convenience stores, he said.
For more on recent efforts to change beer laws in the United States and Canada, read "Looser Beer Sales Laws on Tap."
Click here to view the full BNN report, and watch the embedded video for additional comments by Bouchard about Couche-Tard's recent performance and international expansion efforts.
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