so, you walk into a grocery store nowadays and they're clearly all trying to sell you alcohol - wine, beer, etc. it's expanded from a small part of the store to entire aisles and sections, to the point that it's starting to crowd out other items. are grocery stores going to keep stocking less food and other items, and more alcohol? is the profit ratio that large?

i mean, a freshco or a sobey's is ultimately going to stock the products with the largest returns on them. fresh meat is increasingly rare, which is not such a bad thing, but driven by the economics of it. so, how long before you can't find grapes, because all of the shelf space is occupied by wine? how long before the only way to buy potatoes is via vodka?

the other thing i'm thinking of is how something like this would affect somebody like my mother. i can walk by a giant wine display in a grocery store and not think twice about it. she can't. and, on a bad day, she might just open the bottle in the store and pass out on the floor.

i'm not opposed to the idea of liberalizing the sale of alcohol in principle, but, again, we're seeing what happens when you allow for too much economic freedom in a primitive market society - i just want to blame the problem on markets, and not on freedom. with pollution, you end up with people dying of disease that shouldn't exist, and living with poor qualities of life while they survive. with marijuana, you end up with unlivable and unhealthy living spaces as people act oblivious to the externalities of their behaviour. with prostitution, you'll inevitably end up with corporate pimps pushing the women into conditions of abject slavery. and, with alcohol you're ending up with beer taking over the space of healthy food on the shelves. and, it's all because of the corrupting effects of profit on the general health of a society.