Our Opinion: Great Barrington’s beer and wine license saga concludes, leaving bitter taste for small businesses and hard lessons for Select Board

After Price Chopper’s third application for Great Barrington’s last beer and wine license, it seems this long-bubbling saga has come to an end after the Select Board on Monday night issued the license to the Stockbridge Road supermarket. It still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of the town’s small businesses and buy-local advocates. Hopefully it leaves some lessons for officials, too.

Earlier this year after the Select Board had denied Price Chopper’s license application for a second time, we assessed the tough spot in which the Select Board had put itself. After the state several years ago allowed for municipalities to license more businesses to sell beer and wine, Great Barrington approved one such license for Big Y in 2018, as more Massachusetts supermarkets sought to increase their bottom lines by selling alcohol where folks do their grocery shopping.

While that might have helped out a business and added some convenience for its shoppers, it also set a precedent. While many had hoped these added beer and wine licenses could be a boon for locally owned shops and stores, a chain benefited instead. And so it made sense for Price Chopper to make the case that it should be able to compete with its cross-town competitor and do what it’s done in many other locations by rebranding its Barrington Plaza store as Market 32, complete with alcohol sales. After all, if the town granted a beer and wine license to one supermarket but not another, it would at least appear to be playing big-box favorites. In fact, when the Select Board rebuffed Price Chopper’s two previous license applications, the company threatened to simply close its doors and leave town — and thereby uproot an anchor from the Barrington Plaza.

So, the Select Board in some sense was hemmed in by its own past decision, and in this way it makes sense that the town finally gave the license to Price Chopper. But we agree with local business owners — and the Select Board’s lone dissenting vote Eric Gabriel — that this sets a troubling precedent. Some smaller businesses with more local connection were also in line for this last license, including one that actually applied before Price Chopper.

Last year, the Select Board rejected Ankit Patel’s application for his family’s Shell station, which happens to be located right near Price Chopper on Stockbridge Road. The primary reason for the rejection — that selling beer and wine at a gas station is somehow more encouraging of drunken driving because it is sold alongside snacks and other convenience store items — was specious at best. And that reasoning was totally absent when considering Price Chopper, even as most of its customers will drive there and buy food alongside beer and wine, too.

So in total, the Select Board has established it’s willing to abide by its own precedent when helping one chain compete with another, while maximizing controversy in doing so by dragging its feet, but also willing to quickly about-face on its own precedent when it means giving a beer and wine license to a chain instead of the small, family-owned business that applied first. We understand that the way this saga concluded essentially amounts to the other shoe dropping on a licensing decision made five years ago, but hopefully the whole affair contains some lessons on the values and logic the Select Board brings to bear on these decisions and their knock-on effects in both short and long terms. And if certain industry interests get their way in forwarding another ballot question to increase liquor license caps in Massachusetts, those lessons won’t be just abstract.