Liquor store adds Sunday hours
Published 11:23 pm Friday, July 13, 2007
BOTHELL – Customers will find something different Sunday at the Thrasher’s Corner liquor store.
Doors will be open, lights on and employees waiting to ring up sales inside state-run Store 87 on the Bothell-Everett Highway.
It will be open from noon to 5 p.m. as it joins the state’s expanding experiment with allowing the sale of booze on Sundays.
“Overall the program has exceeded expectations. We’ve brought in more revenue than expected,” said Brian Smith, communications director for the Washington State Liquor Control Board.
Washington had banned Sunday sales since its territorial days. Legislators codified it in 1933 when Prohibition ended.
In 2005, the state Legislature replaced the ban with a pilot program opening 20 liquor stores with historically high volumes of business. They set the hours of operation at noon to 5 p.m.
It chose two in Everett and one in Lynnwood to participate.
The key question was whether an additional day would bring in more revenue or simply give customers a different day to shop.
Sales of hard liquor netted $561 million for cities, counties and the state in the last two years.
Of the total, Sunday sales at those 20 stores generated $7.5 million in new dollars, Smith said.
On top of that were earnings from several state-sanctioned contract liquor stores that took advantage of the 2005 law to also open on Sundays. Thirty-seven of 152 contract stores did, including ones in Granite Falls, Sultan, Coupeville and Langley.
The state does not decide which contract stores open.
Earlier this year, lawmakers agreed to let 29 more state-run stores open. Liquor board officials chose locations scattered around the state, and Thrasher’s Corner was one of them.
Not every store that wanted in was selected.
“We did have people who wanted to be part of it and are not,” Smith said.
Smith estimated the 49 state liquor stores will collectively generate $27 million in Sunday sales in the next two years. Figures for contract stores could not be predicted, he said.
A list of state-run liquor stores open Sundays can be found at www.liq.wa.gov.
Reporter Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
