Last year was busy and profitable for liquor retailers in Michigan as the pandemic locked out competion from restaurants, bars, casinos, stadiums and bowling alleys for most of 2020.
A Bridge Michigan roundup on the windfall for stores of all sizes, summarized earlier below, shows that Metro Detroit dominates a list of the top 10 stores for sales of bottled spirits in 2020. Six are in the tricounty area and two others are nearby in Brighton and Ann Arbor.
Seven of those sellers are Costco branches and another is a Livonia shop on Middlebelt Road. (The list also has Meijer and Costco sites in Grand Rapids.)
Here are the suburban Detroit leaders that Mike Wilkinson of Bridge distilled from a Michigan Liquor Control Commission database:
- Auburn Hills Costco: $3.47 million in liquor sales, up 46% from 2019
- Madison Heights Costco: $3.46 million, up 28%
- Commerce Township Costco: $3.41 million, up 44%
- Shelby Township Costco: $3.22 million, up 37%
- Bloomfield Hills Costco: $3.19 million, up 42%
- The Wine Palace, Livonia: $3.11 million, a 46% jump
Nationally, Costco has the largest liquor sales volume of any U.S. retailer.
Original article, Friday morning:
Your local liquor store isn't the only one that's popping.
Michigan saw a 20-percent increase in alcohol sales last year, even as the pandemic shut down bars for long stretches, a Bridge analysis of state records finds. The gains were most pronounced at grocery and party stores.
Records from the Michigan Liquor Control Commission show that some Costco, Meijer and liquor stores had sales increases of 50 percent to nearly 70 percent from 2019 to 2020.
The highest-volume store in the state, the Costco in Brighton just off U.S. 23 and Interstate 96, had liquor sales climb 67 percent.
The uptick mirrors a national trend that saw people increasingly turn to booze to cope with the stress and grief caused by the pandemic.
