No home delivery from online alcohol sales just yet
On Thursday, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced that in addition to beer in grocery stores, the LCBO would be opening its own online retail shop.
But getting booze from the shop to your doorstep is still a ways away, the provincial liquor store warns.
Genevieve Tomney, a spokesperson for the LCBO, said that home delivery sales won’t happen until the LCBO can work out how to ensure that minors won’t get their hands on the hard stuff.
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“LCBO will ensure that the same high standard of social responsibility exercised in our stores is also met by online sales, including verification of age of the purchaser receiving the alcohol,” she said.
The online store will happen in phases, she said, starting with store pickup, and eventually, home delivery.
“The initial rollout of LCBO’s expanded e-commerce initiative will not include home delivery,” she said.
In some parts of the United States, where consumers can buy alcohol online from private companies and have it delivered to their door, minors have been known to game the system.
A 2012 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics found that underage youth were able to purchase alcohol from popular online vendors 45 per cent of the time.
The study, conducted out of the University of North Carolina by Rebecca Williams, had eight underage students try to purchase from 100 of the most popular sites. Buyers were allowed to lie about their age, but had to present their real ID when asked.
“Greater enforcement of existing policies, or perhaps new policies, are needed to effectively reduce youth access to alcohol online,” Williams wrote in the study.
Catherine Paradis, a researcher at the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse, said the LCBO’s decision to sell online raises some red flags.
“Increase of availability usually transfers into increase of consumption,” she said.
On the other hand, she said, the decision to raise the price of beer should mitigate some of these effects.
“Among all the availability measures, the one that works the best is pricing,” she said.
Not all age-identification measures are the same. In Williams’ study, many of the websites only asked for participants to type their age into a web form, which made it easy for youths to lie. But when the website asked for a driver’s license number, the underage orders were rejected every time.
Quebec’s provincial liquor store, the SAQ, also offers home delivery. Products are shipped through Canada Post, and ID is asked for at the door.
Paradis was not aware of any issues with underage drinking with the SAQ’s online system, but noted that measures used to restrict the age of online gambling in Quebec have been successful.
Although Paradis warns that making alcohol easier to access can lead to overconsumption, she said she thinks the LCBO, as a provincial-run monopoly, will curb many of the wilder reports coming from the States.
“I think having these monopolies is a protective factor,” she said.
MADD Canada, which is staunchly against alcohol privatization, supports the LCBO’s plan for an online store.
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Andrew Murie, the CEO for MADD Canada. “We’ve actually been recommending this.”
Murie said provincially-run websites, unlike American private websites, give people more choice while still maintaining rigorous government oversight.
“We trust the LCBO,” he said.
