If you missed yesterday’s newsletter, you can read here why The Food Section endeavored to rank the top-selling Alcoholic Beverage Control store in contiguous North Carolina’s 97 wet counties. Today, we’re covering how we went about scoring the stores. The worst-to-best list drops next week!
Want the rankings in your inbox? Non-paying readers can purchase the five-day package for just $5!
Stores operated by North Carolina’s 171 ABC boards aren’t entirely exempt from oversight: The state’s ABC Commission periodically conducts performance audits that are supposed to address legal compliance, store appearance, and operating efficiency. It’s important that someone keeps an eye on whether store employees are making bank deposits in a timely manner! (Speaking of timely manners, there are ABC boards which haven’t undergone an audit for more than 12 years.)
But for the purposes of this survey, The Food Section kept its focus on the guest experience.
Because ABC stores are public, “guest” in this context means every North Carolinian adult: Unlike in states where privately-owned liquor shops might try to woo a certain clientele, everyone shops together in the Tar Heel state—which is either the most utopian aspect of the system, or the clearest illustration of Prohibitionists getting their way, since the specter of alcohol abuse and its consequences stalks ABC stores. When lining up to buy a costly Japanese whiskey, it’s not uncommon to have to wait for another customer to count out coins for a fifth of Popov vodka.
In any case, it’s safe to assume that every spirit buyer appreciates a clean, well-lit, and well-organized store, staffed by friendly and helpful employees. As such, our team of evaluators scored stores in four categories: Store Design, Consumer Education, Inventory, and Customer Satisfaction, with 100 total points available.
Our evaluators—Susannah Skiver Barton, Kodaah Hansen, Nichole Livengood, Kathleen Purvis, and Daniel Walton, in addition to myself—visited stores over a three-month period beginning in August. That means the inventory scores are based on what was in stock at a store on the day our evaluator secret-shopped it. In other words, it was just the store’s good luck if TFS showed up soon after a case of Pisco did.
For the most part, scores were issued on an all-or-nothing basis: Either the store has Purple BuzzBallz in its cooler or it doesn’t (usually, it doesn’t.) The primary exceptions were the questions about amaro and additive-free tequila.
With apologies to ABC employees, the latter inquiry was chosen because it’s tricky. Additive-free tequila is a hugely popular category but parsing it correctly entails some knowledge of Mexican law, labeling standards, and agave processing. (Basically, additive-free tequilas aren’t enhanced by glycerin, oak extract, or other shortcuts to appealing color, flavor, or mouthfeel, but it’s long been hard to determine which brands qualify because of a lack of transparency in the tequila industry.)
Here’s how we scored the answers:
So, which store came out on top? Paying subscribers and buyers of the $5 liquor store package find out next week!
No Comments