“The customer will enter through a turnstile, select the bottles of his choice and leave through one of five desks. Two walls are now lined with rum and Canadian whiskys and there are three islands of shelves loaded with liqueurs, brandies and other hard exotics. A separate room, panelled and ornamented with wine barrels, contains a wide range of wines.” — The Toronto Telegram, imagining the experience of shopping at Ontario’s first self-serve liquor store, February 21, 1969
From the time the LCBO opened its first stores in 1927, the provincial government had worked to make the sale and marketing of alcohol as unappealing as possible. A heavy-handed thou-shalt-not-drink attitude reigned supreme: liquor was kept behind no-nonsense counters, and customers were required to hold purchasing permits.
By the late 1960s, customers were tired of being condescended to. At that point, anyone who wanted to purchase alcohol had to enter an LCBO store, sign a slip, and hand it to a clerk, who retrieved the item and then presented it in a paper bag. As a Toronto-area customer told the Telegram in 1969, the process “makes you feel like a criminal or something. It’s a lot of nonsense.” Some clerks agreed and were willing to accept slips signed by noted Ontarians like Donald Duck. But conditions that shamed the public for wanting to buy liquor could go on only so long as society grew more relaxed and less morally uptight.
On July 23, 1968, provincial secretary Robert Welch announced a comprehensive review of Ontario’s liquor laws. The government unveiled plans to open three test “self-serve” liquor stores in Metro Toronto the following year and hinted it would look into extending drinking hours on the weekend (under Sunday blue laws, last call on Saturday was 11:30 p.m.), lowering the drinking age (which happened in 1971), and selling beer in grocery stores (which wouldn’t happen until 2015). Welch believed these changes were necessary to prove to younger Ontarians that “we are hip and relevant.” When asked whether he was concerned about dropping the drinking age from 21 to 18, Welch replied, “I’ve got more confidence in young persons’ approach to drinking than I have in some people who are 61.”
Photo showing the interior of the first self-serve liquor store. (Globe and Mail, February 22, 1969)
The official launch site was 40 South Station Street in Weston. The store’s initial selection included 800 brands of hard liquor, which, according to the Telegram, were arranged “like brazen hussies in a nightclub.” Two consultants, easily identified by their green blazers, were available to guide customers through the 170 Canadian and 140 imported varieties of wine. If a consultant wasn’t around, customers could check a card that was placed under each type of wine and indicated its level of sweetness. Among the remaining store staff were three part-time clerks that the Telegram claimed were the first female employees to work in a liquor store. None of the items on the shelf required a signed slip for purchase.
Opponents of self-service argued that it was another step toward too much permissiveness in society and that it would ruin more lives and create social depravity. Reverend Gordon Brown of Runnymede Baptist Church felt that easier access to alcohol would raise the crime rate: “It’s definitely a retrograde move. Criminality is related to alcohol.” The Salvation Army believed the LCBO had bowed to political pressure. Temperance advocates and religious organizations that worked with alcoholics feared that drunk-driving incidents would skyrocket. “Brewing industries are the spoiled brats of our times,” United Church of Canada minister Reverend W. Clarke MacDonald told the Telegram. “The tax they pay does not begin to pay the loss their liquor places on society.”
Photo of the first self-serve liquor store. (Weston Times, February 27, 1969)
Opposition also came from LCBO employees. “It’ll never work,” Bill Reed, a clerk at the liquor store at York and Wellington streets, told the Telegram. “It won’t reduce the number of staffers required, it won’t be any faster — if anything, it’ll be slower and there will be a lot of shoplifting.” To combat shoplifters, and any temperance zealots tempted to wander in to smash the inventory, mirrors were set up around the Weston store so that staff could watch for any fishy activity.
The first sale at the Weston store on February 24, 1969, was made to local resident and trucking-firm operator Douglas Wardrope, who was more interested in the historical significance of the moment than in what was in his paper bag. “I’m not even sure of what I got,” he told the TorontoStar. “I guess I just wanted to be first.” (For the record, it was a $2.55 bottle of Canadian whisky.) Wardrope raved about the new store and how fast he was able to get in and out.
Many customers interviewed on their way out of the store praised the new format. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time,” one woman told the CBC. “I think everybody’s really going to enjoy it.” Nobody missed filling out the hated slips, which were also phased out that day at traditional counter-service LCBO and Brewers’ Retail stores. The only info customers might need to provide at those stores was the brand they wanted.
Photo of St. Catharines' first self-serve liquor store. (St. Catharines Standard, June 16, 1972)
In an editorial published that day, the Hamilton Spectator wrote that self-service was “one short step in the long journey to more sensible liquor laws in this province.” It was annoyed that such experiments always seemed to happen in the Toronto area, when they could be conducted elsewhere in the province with equally valid results. “Ontario must avoid the disease of ‘capitalitis’ whose worst symptom is over-centralization.” It believed that it was “time the government tried trusting the people.”
Ontario’s venture into self-service was part of a nation-wide wave that gained momentum as the 1960s ended. Some provinces even experimented with stores that offered a comfortable atmosphere; one store in Saint John, New Brunswick, featured soft background music and carpeted floors.
Ad announcing opening of Windsor's first self-serve liquor store. (Windsor Star, December 13, 1972)
While none of the new Ontario stores were that fancy, self-service made its way across the province — albeit slowly due to the expense of renovating suitable old locations or building new stores. By May 1973, just under a quarter of the LCBO’s 489 outlets featured the new format. When they arrived in a community, they were a major success, as sales increased by at least 50 per cent. “Since it has changed, customers spend a lot more time browsing around, asking questions, finding items they didn’t know existed and often buying four or five times as much as they had intended to,” Reg Soanes, the manager of Kitchener’s Fairview Park store, told the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in 1972. “There’s better rapport between the public and the store.”
Women found more opportunities in what had traditionally been a male domain, taking jobs as cashiers and, occasionally, as shelf stockers in the new stores. “Their presence produces a little more respect,” Soanes observed. “Besides, some of the language has been cleaned up.”
Photo of Sault Ste. Marie's first self-serve liquor store. (Sault Star, March 12, 1973)
Sometimes the new stores accidentally created new community gathering spaces. When a self-serve location opened in Deseronto in 1971, its parking lot became a magnet for local youths during the evening. “The liquor store parking lot is the best piece of pavement in Deseronto right now,” a local councillor told the Kingston Whig-Standard, “and the youngsters are out in force with their bicycles and hockey sticks to take advantage of it.”
“I really think they’ll all be like this some day,” a customer told the CBC as he exited the first self-serve store in 1969. “In about 20 years, anyway, I don’t think there will be anything else but these.” His prediction was an accurate one, as the last of the counter-service stores were phased out in the mid-1990s. The original Weston store is currently being used as a mosque, though there is a proposal to redevelop the site.
Sources: the July 24, 1968, edition of the Globe and Mail; the February 24, 1969, edition of the Hamilton Spectator; the February 20, 1970, and November 15, 1971, editions of the Kingston Whig-Standard; the September 9, 1972, edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; the May 12, 1973, edition of the Owen Sound Sun-Times; the July 24, 1968, February 20, 1969, February 21, 1969, and February 23, 1969, editions of the Toronto Star; and the February 21, 1969, and February 22, 1969, editions of the Telegram.
Donate