The Wake

For almost ten years, Witt’s Liquor has been tucked snugly into the Park and Shop parking ramp on Seventh Street near Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, offering off-sale libations to the patrons that walk the streets and work the businesses surrounding it.

To be certain, any business dealing in the trade of “intoxicating liquors” is in for its fair share of bumps and bruises. It’s something the staff at Witt’s is quite familiar with. A lot of the customers are people fumbling with their luck. Many are homeless, quite a few are veterans living in the outskirts of society, and still more are just punks. They pour into the store in an interesting mix with the professionals who keep their offices downtown and the custodians and secretaries who also look for relief in a nice glass of wine or a cold six-pack. It’s always a balancing act. Inevitably, the sale of “intoxicating liquors” ferments into some sort of altercation.

It’s been a tightrope proprietor Justin Greer has walked, after he decided with his brother Seth to open a “simpler business” ten years ago. “Don’t blame the liquor store because people like to drink,” he says. “I think for every one thing we’ve done wrong, there are probably thousands of things we’ve done right.”

His staff has compiled a lengthy list of customers who have been barred from the store for life. In fact, the average customer at Witt’s would tell you his staff does a more than admirable job of managing the stress that walks through their door. Many customers have been shopping at Witt’s for the nearly the length of its existence, and they enjoy the way they are treated, though they know their quick stop to pick up alcohol can get interesting.

While most customers are kind and courteous, sometimes they can be trouble. “The types of customers we have are so very different,” says general manager Marie Morris, who has worked for Greer the past four years. “I feel that there is no excuse for calling me a white bitch, or expecting me to pay for the rest of your drink because you’re short of money, or to allow you to steal from the store,” she says. “In this respect, it’s the hardest place I’ve ever worked.” Greer adds, “We’ve done a great job serving whoever wants to be served liquor and done it in a completely legal and forthright way, as long as we’ve been here. It hasn’t always been easy for us to do that.”

Witt’s has been a shelter to many wandering souls, a place “where we could all count on to come back home, and sort of be taken care of,” says Greer. “It’s been a source of joy for me that I’ve been able to find people that work with me so well. It’s a place that can afford everyone that works here a lot of personal freedoms to be however they want to be and work when they want to work and be away when they need to be away,” he says.

Family life at the store got tense this past fall, when a valued and trusted employee failed an age-compliance check, not once, but twice in as many months. City police, teamed with licensing officials, recruit young adults under the legal age and deploy them in bars and liquor stores in order to check whether or not the establishment is complying with the laws on the sale of alcohol to minors.

Principal author of a comprehensive manual on age compliance checks, Alex C. Wagenaar, says, “Conducting compliance checks is not an easy task, but police and beverage-control agencies now have access to proven techniques for monitoring alcohol sales to minors.”

Many who work in the retail liquor industry call those techniques suspect. Many feel it is entrapment, though the police say they are only creating an opportunity for a crime to be committed. “I know by their definition, what they’re doing is not defined as entrapment,” Greer says, “but it is. It’s a complete setup. When you set somebody up to be able to commit a so-called crime, that’s entrapment, isn’t it?”

Even after the employee failed for the second time, Greer was reluctant to let him go. He says the city forced the issue as part of the agreement he would come to in order to keep his liquor license. On top of a fine of over $10,000, Witt’s has also been forced to purchase $1,500 worth of ID scanners. Turns out the scanners, which record more than just the customer’s age, are the hardest part of the fine.

“It’s already hurting business. We have to turn away people who are obviously of age, people who have no business having to carry around an ID in order to buy some beer. We have to turn away people all day long,” Greer says. The city has also stipulated that only four kinds of ID are valid: state issued IDs, Canadian IDs, passports, and military IDs. Many of Witt’s customer’s carry anything but, whether it’s a Mexican license, a foreign driver’s license, or nothing at all because they live their lives on the street.

“Beyond that, they’re telling me that in order to keep my license, not only will I purchase this equipment, but I also have to interface it with a PC that will record all of this information and not only record it, but be able to burn it on a CD to surrender to the police whenever they want me to surrender it,” Greer says. “Maybe I’m a little paranoid, I don’t know, but why would you need all of that information?”

His fears of lost business appear to be warranted. In 2001, the MGM Liquor Warehouse in Crystal ordered the same license scanners by mistake. They had intended to order ones that simply read the customers age and nothing else from the license. When customers began noticing all the information from their ID cards appearing on the store’s computer screens, they were not pleased. They complained to MGM’s headquarters and even had a letter to the editor published in the Star Tribune, and the scanners were immediately removed and the databases erased.

MGM says it lost customers due to its scanning machines. Witt’s is one-tenth the size of the average MGM outlet and can’t afford the loss in customers, which Greer figures is probably around 20 percent.

However, according to Sgt. Travis Glampe of the Minneapolis Police License Investigation Division, no liquor licenses have ever been revoked because of age compliance failures. Instead, every business that fails it—and many do every year—are simply forced to pay similar fines.

Either way, the scanners are just another challenge the staff at Witt’s faces. “This place, love it or not,” explains manager Morris, “is our livelihood. No one here is living high on the hog and I wish that some of our customers and some the city officials could walk a mile in our shoes.”