Beer distributors in the area saw a significant sales increase in 2020
Holly Hendershot | Herald-Standard
An employee stocks shelves at RJ Beer Warehouse in Uniontown.
Holly Hendershot | Herald-Standard
RJ Beer Warehouse in Uniontown was just one of the beer stores that saw a rise in sales last year.
Beer distributors in the area saw a significant increase in sales in the past year, and owners attribute that to the pandemic.
Sales at RJ Beer Warehouse in Uniontown jumped by an estimated 30% in 2020, store owner Rob Jamieson said.
“I don’t consider this a normal year either,” he said. “People are still staying home, and unfortunately some bars did not re-open, so I’m sure the area lost a lot of smaller bars that couldn’t afford to stay open.”
He said their sales now, although not quite as high as 2020, still remain higher than they were before the pandemic.
In Washington County, Fredericktown Beer also continues to see an increase in sales — almost double their sales in 2019, said store employee John Childs.
“As soon as covid hit last year, we got a huge spike in people, and then it didn’t stay as big as the spike was, but it’s been steadily busier since then,” he said. “The weekends are definitely way bigger than they used to be.”
Travis Lutes, manager of Lone Pine Beer Store in Washington, said their sales started to surge in February 2020, as news that COVID-19 had hit the U.S. began to spread. Throughout summer, he said the rise in sales continued.
Although warmer weather always brings in more people, Lutes said the rise was a notable difference from 2019. Even now, he said, they still have more foot-traffic in the store than they did pre-pandemic.
Still, there were challenges last year, Jamieson said.
“Not everything was great,” he said. “We ran out of some certain products that were good sellers because of production issues.”
When some manufacturers shut down, there was a lack of cans, bottles and other supplies, so stores were unable to re-stock fully, he said.
According to the American Addiction Centers at americanaddictioncenters.org, about one in every three Pennsylvanians deemed alcohol an essential product during the pandemic.
When Gov. Tom Wolf announced state-run liquor stores would temporarily close as part of mitigation efforts in March 2020, some waited in lines for hours to stock up. And when Fine Wine & Good Spirits stores started taking online orders April 1, the state reported $7.1 million in online sales in the first 23 days. That amount surpassed the $5 million in alcohol people bought online during the entire prior fiscal year.
When the state opened limited curbside pickup at the stores, customers placed 38,100 orders in the first four days that resulted in nearly $3.6 million in sales.
Jamieson said the increase in alcohol sales isn’t all that surprising. For many, he said, alcohol became a way to help people cope with the unprecedented year.