Letters: Penna. liquor stores provide revenue and jobs

Inquirer readers deserve better than the inaccurate column by Monica Yant Kinney on Pennsylvania wine and spirit shops ("Behind an upscale look, same old PLCB," Sunday).

This isn't 1980. Today, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board uses its buying power to deliver competitive prices to its customers. It's modernizing its stores. It has Sunday hours. Stores are open in supermarkets. State-of-the-art wine kiosks are being readied for rollout in other supermarkets. If you can't find what you want, store clerks will tell you whether it can be brought in from another store or ordered for delivery to your store. We're widely recognized as a wine-friendly state.

Yant Kinney wrongly states that the PLCB "kicked in" $105 million a year to the state treasury. Try more than $500 million a year to the state and municipal treasuries, and growing.

And then she seems to complain mean-spiritedly that a PLCB worker with 26 years on the job makes more than the $30,766-a-year average for PLCB employees. And - oh, no! - he has a pension, too!

Is Yant Kinney or any 26-year veteran reporter or columnist colleague at The Inquirer making only $30,766 a year, or offering to give up the pension to which you contributed for all of those years? I doubt it. Why all of the anger at men and women who work hard to earn a modest salary to support their families?

The fact is that the PLCB does a great job in preventing sales to minors - a job that no private sector operation could match. It collects 100 percent of the taxes on the products it sells - again, a performance that no private-sector operation could come near. And it can boast year after year of sales growth.

Wendell W. Young IV

President

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776

Philadelphia