WALMART SPENT TWENTY YEARS LOSING THIS FIGHT. THIS YEAR IT BROUGHT YOUR BODEGA ALONG.

On September 21, a coalition of the state's largest grocers and retailers told Albany it wants to sell wine and spirits. Standing with them, for the first time, were organizations representing New York City bodegas and convenience stores. That did not change the law. It changed the picture, and the picture is the point.

Wine and spirits in New York remain restricted to roughly 4,000 licensed independent liquor stores. There is no new license class for corner stores. There is no State Liquor Authority fee schedule for one, because there is nothing to set a fee for. There is no application window and no queue. The vehicle is a bill from Assemblymember Amanda Septimo, a Bronx Democrat, with a Senate companion, and it is sitting in committee. Septimo has framed the push around pressure and money, telling CBS New York that the state "really needs tax revenue."

This distinction is not pedantry. If a bodega owner reads that licensing has opened and starts budgeting for inventory, a shelf build, or a consultant, he is spending against something that does not exist. The gap between a lobbying announcement and a law is exactly where small operators get sold expectations.

The Coalition to Expand Consumer Choice includes Wegmans, Walmart and Target, along with Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, plus Instacart and a set of wineries. Its chair is Mona Golub, a vice president at Northeast Grocery, the company that owns Price Chopper and Tops. Supermarkets and big box stores have pushed for wine in grocery stores for nearly two decades and lost every round. This year they widened the ask to include liquor, and they widened the roster to include bodegas and convenience stores.

Radhames Rodriguez, president of United Bodegas of America, signed on and framed it as a fairness argument, saying small businesses "deserve the opportunity to compete and serve them."

The addition is strategic and it is legible. For twenty years the opposition's strongest card was a simple image: wine in groceries means Walmart against the family liquor store. Putting bodegas at the table rearranges who is standing where in that photo. It does not change who wrote the bill or who benefits most from it.

Read the text. Beyond removing the prohibition on grocery stores selling wine and liquor, the bill does two structural things that have drawn far less attention than the headline. It grandfathers existing grocery stores into the 200 foot rule, the provision that bars liquor licenses within that distance of schools and places of worship. And it removes the prohibition on an individual holding more than one license to sell liquor or wine.

That second clause is the one built for scale. New York currently allows one wine license per entity. It is the reason Trader Joe's operates a wine shop at exactly one address in the entire state. A chain with hundreds of New York locations does not need permission to sell wine so much as it needs permission to sell wine hundreds of times.

Run it against a bodega. An owner with one store on Southern Boulevard gets one license under the current cap, and one license without it. The cap costs him nothing. It costs Wegmans everything. When the same bill carries both provisions and gets sold as a small business measure, the small business is doing work that the small business does not get paid for.

The bodega side is not unified, which is the part the coalition announcement flattens. Frank Marte, a Bronx bodega owner who heads the Bodega and Small Business Group, had not joined as of late last week. He wants wine. He is wary of ready to drink cans, the premixed cocktails and hard seltzers currently restricted to liquor stores, and has raised concern about behavior outside his store. On wine, his framing is domestic: you buy it "for an occasion, to take it home."

So "bodegas want this" is not a fact. It is one trade group's position, and another Bronx group is still deciding.

On the other side sit those 4,000 independent liquor stores, the businesses holding the exclusive right the coalition wants opened. They are almost entirely single location. Most are family owned. Many are immigrant owned, which is the same profile the coalition is currently borrowing to make its case. They have beaten this before by organizing under the Last Store on Main Street banner, and by spending. The Metropolitan Package Store Association's political action committee put roughly $1.3 million into state and local campaigns between 2008 and 2022, according to state disclosure data reported by Gothamist.

The honest read is this. A bill that lets bodegas sell wine would help bodegas. A bill that also lifts the one license cap helps chains more, by a margin no corner store can close. Both provisions live in the same text, and they will be sold to Albany as one thing. When the press release says small business, check which section it is pointing at.

SEE WHICH LINE THE CHAINS ACTUALLY NEED

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