Liquor stickers cost Utah $1M a year

Kelly Evans is clicking one orange sticker after another out of her plastic pricing gun, slapping them on the sides of the wine bottles.

It's a routine that hundreds of employees at state liquor stores around Utah will repeat again and again, placing a total of 24 million of the state identification labels on as many bottles throughout the year.

Why?

No one is really sure.

When the drill was started decades ago, it was considered a reasonable way to track the merchandise and make sure that all of the booze consumed in the state had properly passed through the state's oversight and control.

Today, when it's easier to inventory and track merchandise by the bar code on the bottle, it is a pointless exercise. Yet taxpayers have been paying nearly $1 million a year to have one sticker after another put on the shiny bottles.

It looks like that is about to change. Sen. Scott McCoy, D-Salt Lake City, is sponsoring a bill this session to end the practice. His legislation is expected to be rolled into a larger package of liquor reform bills, the $1 million steered to cracking down on drunken drivers and other liquor enforcement.

The Senate unanimously gave McCoy's bill preliminary approval Friday.

"It really, in fact, is a redundancy," said McCoy. "This is an example of where modern technology has taken over and outstripped the old practices and done so in a way that is a million dollars cheaper to the state than the old system."

The state liquor commission hasn't taken a formal position on the bill, but John Freeman, deputy director of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, says it's an idea the staff supports.

Not only will it save money, he says, but it also will bring to an end the repetitive stress injuries created by the incessant squeezing of the trigger on the sticker gun. And, the boxes wouldn't have to be opened before a case is shipped to a restaurant or bar, saving

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staff from having to cut open the boxes and risk slicing themselves.

In the past 16 years, the state has filed charges in just four cases of alleged sticker violations -- one brought over just a single stickerless bottle of malt liquor. After the bill passes, instead of going into a restaurant or bar and looking for the sticker, officers can simply scan the bar code to verify it is in the state's system.

"From staff's standpoint, it's going to be a nice thing to see go away," Freeman said.

Tribune photographer Scott Sommerdorf contributed to this story.