John Roughan: Let's drink to competition

If you are an ignorant wine lover like me, you have probably discovered how good a dedicated shop can be.

Twenty years ago a visit to a wine shop was not much better than a prowl around supermarket shelves today. There was a limited range of popular varieties, some priced to clear.

You made a selection with minimal assistance and knew from bitter experience not to try anything unfamiliar, particularly if it was red.

Twenty years ago, when Parliament passed a law allowing wine to be sold in supermarkets, everybody supposed it would spell the death of the wine shop. So much for supposition.

I have a nearby supplier these days who has noted what I like, knows my modest price preference and, more often than not, has a new vintage to recommend. Invariably, it is superb.

Next time I call he wants to hear what I thought of it. He would discuss the finer points of flavour and viticulture all day if I was interested. I'm not; I don't need to know any of the technical lore as long as there are people like him in business.

Here's to him, here's to all the customers that keep him solvent, here's to supermarkets that force him to compete on service, here's to the Sale of Liquor Act, 1989.

I mention this because the liberal liquor laws of the late 20th Century are in imminent danger of reversal. The sale of alcohol from supermarkets, the proliferation of suburban liquor stores and the lowering of the minimum purchasing age to 18 are blamed for under-age and binge drinking, domestic violence, even armed robberies.

Public health researchers have been campaigning for a return to restrictions ever since a further amendment to the Act in 1999 put beer in supermarkets and let 18- and 19-year-olds buy it.

Slowly they seem to have convinced MPs the tide should turn. A tipping point came last June when Manurewa liquor store owner Navtej Singh was shot during a robbery. Helen Clark asked the Law Commission to review the trade. When National came to office it asked the commission to make haste.

Its chairman, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who became prime minister the year wine was allowed into supermarkets by the usual free vote of MPs, plans a report by the end of next month.

His speeches and interviews lately suggest the commission will propose that excessive consumption be tackled with alcohol taxes. The industry seems to be expecting advertising restrictions too.

I don't know if higher prices will deter binge drinking and other sins. The researchers assure us it will. Nor do I know whether wine shops will continue to offer an assiduous service if supermarkets can no longer advertise today's price differentials.

What I do know is that the benefit competition has brought for consumers like me is unlikely to figure in the decision. The benefits of competition seldom attract social research.

Around the time that supermarkets were given the right to sell wine and beer, they were pressing for the right to sell pharmaceuticals too. When you go to a chemist these days you could be forgiven for thinking competition had arrived.

Last time I asked for a common decongestant I got 20 questions on my condition and an introduction to all the remedies on the shelf.

With other customers waiting it was all a little public but I appreciated the effort and wondered what inspired it.

Unlike wine sellers and liquor wholesalers, the pharmacy lobby had been successful in averting deregulation in the 1990s.

I'm not sure how they persuaded a government that supermarkets and others should not be allowed to hire a pharmacist and dispense prescriptions as only self-employed pharmacists could do. Like all good lobbyists, their guild got to ministers when deregulation was still just a gleam in official eyes, before political positions were taken, before much public discussion.

Their protection preserved, chemists continued mixing prescriptions and clipping the public ticket while their counter staff showed about as much interest in the average customer as wine merchants used to do.

So why are we getting some professional attention suddenly? The reason emerged after the swine flu scare. It is not competition, sadly, but quite the opposite. The guild is pitching for a bigger slice of the public health budget.

With sufficient "incentives", it says, pharmacies could provide private consulting rooms, customer monitoring services, even home-visits.

There's a better way for us to get that sort of value from their business. Let supermarkets and the like hire qualified pharmacists and apply greater economies of scale to the dispensing of medicines.

The chemist at the corner would probably then quickly cease selling sunglasses and dubious remedies on the back of his prescription monopoly. He would, like my wine shop, stock only what he could reliably recommend, and he would survive on the quality of his attention and care.

Here's to competition.