2009.11.16
College campuses, big-selling liquor stores and under-age buyer busts can go hand-in-hand
Virginia has 332 state-run liquor stores flung into all corners of the state. Some do big business. Others, not so much. The busiest ones, you'd guess -- mostly correctly -- are in the most populated places: Virginia Beach, Richmond, Fairfax County.
But, at No. 7 on the list, the store on South Main Street, Blacksburg, Va, less than a mile from the Virginia Tech campus. The two other liquor stores in Montgomery County combined didn't do the volume of that store. That's just one example of the noteworthy juxtaposition of a number of those top-selling stores (as measured by gallons sold) with college campuses.
We put the top 50 stores on a map to see how many lined up near Virginia's 42 four-year residential colleges.
Check out the University of Virginia. Just down Emmett Street are two of the top 50 stores.
And it's not just the big universities. Longwood University, in Farmville, has about 4,000 students -- and one of the top 50 stores just a little ways down Main Street.
Along with the top liquor stores, we also mapped licensed alcohol sellers busted for selling to under-age buyers. State ABC agents routinely conduct under-cover inspections of places licensed to sell beer and wine by sending in operatives who are actually 17-19 years old to buy alcohol. The inspections are essentially random, but where they're conducted can be influenced by the availability of under-age operatives and they can also be prompted by citizen complaints.
Between July 2008 and June 2009, licensees failed inspections 483 times. In the same period, nearly 4,200 inspections produced no violations, so the mass of sellers are following the law.
With nearly 500 of those violations on our map, naturally they're all over the state, but you can see on the map that quite a few of the red Xs marking them are, again, near college campuses.
