No One Saw This Coming

Massachusetts
has always known a thing or two about astonishing
history-making upsets against seemingly impossible odds. In
1775, it was all about a ragtag militia group of passionate
guerilla-like Minutemen routing a mighty and well-trained
superior fighting force of British Red Coats from behind the
stonewalls of Lexington and Concord, thus beginning the
American Revolution. Three years ago, it was our heroic Red
Sox taking down the vaunted Yankees with their unprecedented
four-game miracle comeback in the ALC showdown, en route to
their first improbable World Series championship in 86
years.

Now we can add
another historic upset to the record, when just this past
Election Day, November 8, a tireless and resourceful
grassroots campaign, organized by a volunteer group of
dedicated, but uninitiated Massachusetts beverage alcohol
retailers, with some key support from wine and beer
distributors, took on the formidable wealthy corporate food
industry proponents of Question 1 on the Massachusetts
ballot. It was a political battle almost everyone predicted
would leave the Vote No initiatives buried at the polls. At
one point, only a few months before the election, focus
pollsters had the No Voters behind by as much as 78 to 22.
But, to the astonishment of all the pundits, and most
everyone else, the retailers not only prevailed, but ended
up winning by a stunning 58 to 44% landslide margin that
carried in 318 of the 351 cities and towns of the
Commonwealth. And many people, both here and in retail
markets all across the country, are still scratching their
heads, wondering, “How the hell did they ever manage to pull
that one off?”

At a glance, the
issue at stake in Ballot Question 1 was basically
supermarket interests petitioning for the right to be
granted something over 2OOO new alcohol licenses for the
sale of wine in their various store outlets all around the
state. People first began hearing about it in late autumn
2OO5. The idea presented was one of convenience for food
shoppers – a mom could now pick up some wine when she’s out
buying her food for dinner kind of thing. But, when licensed
package store owners and their attorneys began taking a
close look at the proposal, they found the language vague,
loaded with all kinds of red flags, loop holes and an
underlying scenario, which not only threatened their own
established retail operations but also raised serious public
safety issues about the responsible sale of alcohol, not to
mention the viability of this state’s venerable
tried-and-true three-tier system of beverage alcohol
distribution.

“The way the
text was written,” recalls Mike Cimini, the independent
owner of Sturbridge-based Yankee Spirits, and one of the key
players on the Opposition Committee team that was formed to
challenge the Ballot Question, “it meant that all these
supermarkets would be able to have all these licenses and be
able to sell wine, but that there would be no change
whatsoever for the independent owners. So, the biggest
implication was that, not only had they written a bill that
would effectively change the law in their arena, but also
that it had been written in such a way that it didn’t allow
for fair competition across the spectrum. It was just
affecting foodstores. So, unless independent retailers
wanted to get into the food business, first, they weren’t
going to be able to get into these licenses, and obviously
this was going to devalue every liquor license out there.
All of a sudden there’d be all these new licenses they were
selling, and we’d be limited in the scope of competition.
So, a call was made at a meeting of Massachusetts Package
Store Association members for volunteers for a committee to
steer the opposition to this. At this point we really didn’t
know what this would involve, but this is where myself and
all the rest of our guys came in and started meeting as an
opposition committee group to collect our thoughts and put
something into process.”

Aside from
Cimini, other retailers who stepped into key roles on the
Committee were MassPack’s First Vice President and owner of
Norwood-based The Winexpress, Peter Kessel, who became the
Committee Chairman, also Buddy Carp, owner of Raynham and
Taunton Wine & Liquor, Rick Curtis of Curtis Liquors in
South Weymouth, and MassPack Treasurer and owner of
Sandwich-based Canterbury Liquors on Cape Cod, Dick Hurley.
Still others included Joe Saia, owner of West Concord Liquor
Store, MassPack Board Director Chris Smith, who owns
Plymouth-based Long Ridge Wine & Spirits and The Wine
Shop in Brighton, Chris Gasparro, owner of Seekonk Liquors,
John Haronian of Douglas Wine, and MassPack members Jeff
Crisileo and Ben Weiner. Also playing key advisory roles
were MassPack Executive Director Frank Anzalotti, his
counterpart from the Massachusetts Wine & Spirits
Distributors Association, Bob Hurley, and Massachusetts Beer
Distributors Association Executive Director, John
Stasiowski.

“The first thing
we did was to look at a number of legal challenges to the
petition,” recalls Cimini. “Some of these were advanced by
the wine and spirits guys in concert with our attorneys. And
one of the key things, at this point, is that it was at this
point we learned that in order to be a statewide valid
question, it had to involve all the 351 towns in the
Commonwealth. This meant two things, which the supermarkets
would later deny throughout the entire campaign. First one
was that it made dry towns wet, without any further
legislation. In other words, if this thing had passed, the
selectmen in the dry town would have been able to issue
licenses without asking for any further input from their
public, even though the town had voted on several occasions
to be dry. So, the state would be effectively over-ruling
that position.

“Other thing we
learned was that convenience stores were part of this mix,
because, since the issue has to touch all towns in the
state, there aren’t supermarkets in all these 351 towns. The
largest foodstore is sometimes a convenience store. And in
order to pass a state constitutional muster, the ballot had
to affect all 351 towns. This is how the supermarkets ended
up shooting themselves in the foot, I think, because they
never intended to include convenience stores, and were
trying to muscle out all the other competition. But the way
that the law had to be written, they ended up de facto
having to include them in the language. Anyway, all this was
starting to take shape at the end of 2OO5, less than a year
before the election.”

After taking a
break to attend to the holiday business crunch in their
stores, the Committee reconvened in January 2OO6 and the
campaign got underway in earnest. They began interviewing PR
firms for professional advice, settling on Rasky-Baerlein, a
strategic communications campaign specialist. “At this
point, we learned it was going be a $3 million effort to
fight,” says Cimini, “and that the supermarkets intended to
spend about $5 million. They were principally led by Stop
& Shop, the biggest contributor and of course owned by
the huge Dutch multinational giant Royal Ahold, but Shaw’s
and Star were right behind, and then Big Y, Price Shopper,
Shop Rite, Whole Foods, and virtually every other
substantial food store interest you can think of were also
in the mix. It certainly appeared to be a daunting lineup of
Goliaths, all right. And part of the problem we faced was
that a lot of retailers, not to mention a great many
wholesalers, simply felt there was no way we could win
against these giants. And there was some thought they were
even going to pump $1O million into the fight against us
before it was over.”

For the
campaign’s $3 million war chest, it was agreed with the Wine
and Spirits Wholesalers and also Beer Distributors
Associations that the cost would be split evenly, a million
a piece. Sort of a three-legged stool, they considered it.
And because of his extensive experience raising funds for
charities and local civic causes, Cimini was appointed the
fund-raising chair on the Committee with the unenviable task
to go out and try and raise $1 million from retailers. “We
kind of hoped that this would be the thing to pull almost
everyone together,” Cimini observes, “something that would
coordinate people, and something large enough to create a
critical mass. We were only asking $1OOO from each store
owner, and we created a slogan, “$1OOO from 1OOO stores.”
But at the end of the day, we ended up getting contributions
from only about 4OO different stores out of 25OO overall,
including 18OO different operators. And it’s hard to be
entirely accurate on this point, because, for example, I’m
an independent operator with two stores, and I gave out of
both stores, but I’m only considered one operator. So we
really weren’t successful getting a broad spectrum on the
donation front. It meant some of us had to dig quite a bit
deeper into our pockets. But we did know that we were going
to be out-spent by 3 to 5 million in this fight, and we
decided we needed to use as much grassroots effort as
possible.

“One thing that
I don’t think has ever been done in a ballot campaign in
Massachusetts, or perhaps anywhere,” Cimini points out, “is
that we rolled out all the usual campaign tricks like voter
registration with independent retailers, in-store
information sessions with consumers, and eventually driving
people to the polls kind of thing. These are things not
normally done over ballot questions, but they’re done all
the time by candidates. And what we were also able to do was
to get retailers who hadn’t given any money to do lots of
things like put up posters in stores, to talk it up with
customers, to register their staff to vote. And about 5O% of
Massachusetts retailers were willing to come aboard and do
this kind of thing. So, although we had a number of people
who just weren’t savvy enough at the time to make an
investment to save their business, we got them involved and
contributing in these other effective grassroots
ways.”

In fact, it was
a keen understanding of grassroots numbers and strategies
that proved to be a particularly brilliant part of the Vote
No campaign effort. “It’s one thing that we really got
right,” Cimini declares. “I mean stop and think about it.
There’s probably something like 3OO,OOO employees in the
off-premise liquor sector. Between the salesmen that call on
us, the drivers, and all the people in the stores, it’s just
a huge number. And we were also able to leverage some of the
on-premise folks into our way of thinking, emphasizing the
impact this would have on them, too. Obviously, if this
petition had succeeded, it would have doubled the account
servicing work load for wholesalers, with more delivery
trucks, larger sales forces, but with very little additional
profit from sales. And if operational costs go up for the
wholesalers, costs go up for everybody.

“Of course none
of us knew, at the time, we’d be winning this thing by a
landslide,” Cimini adds. “That would have been
inconceivable, in fact. At best, we thought this was a nip
and tuck kind of thing. The fact is we were well behind for
most of the campaign, and it was only the optimism of our
committee that really kept the issue going. But among our
handful of key committee members, almost all of us felt we
could win this all along. No kidding on this point. And
every one of us absolutely shared this conviction towards
the end. But one of our biggest challenges throughout was to
keep convincing a whole helluva lot of other people that we
were right.”

Chris Smith was
one Committee player who didn’t come aboard until about
halfway through the campaign in June. “I’ll be honest to say
that, at first, I really didn’t think we could win this
fight,” Chris admits. “But, at the same time, I wasn’t
willing to sit back and lose. I saw so many people cashing
in the minute the ballot question became official. They were
convinced we didn’t have a chance. They gave up. I wasn’t
prepared for that. Maybe the consumer was looking at this
mainly as a matter of ‘Why can’t I buy alcohol in my Stop
& Shop?’ But I was fired up by the fact that I saw this
as fight between hard-working responsible individuals like
myself up against shameless outright corporate greed. This
really touched a raw nerve. So, about May, I told my
business partner and my wife, ‘Don’t expect to see me
around. Every extra minute I have I’m dedicating to this,
because at the end of the day, it’s only six months, and if
I don’t do everything possible to help us win, I won’t feel
good about myself.’

“I’m a young guy
in this industry, only 32,” Chris continues, “and I’ve only
been on my own for five years. But I love this business, and
what particularly inspires me is the responsibility it
represents, something a lot larger than myself. To hold a
liquor license is a tremendous responsibility and a mandate
of public trust, and I like being entrusted with all this.
Maybe the Stop & Shops might have done a good job with
wine licenses, although I have reservations about any
supermarket’s responsible control of alcohol what with all
the other things they sell. But everybody else who was
entitled to these new licenses down to the 7-Elevens, gas
station and convenience market types of outlets, I didn’t
feel they would or could do a responsible job. So, you would
decimate the industry, and who knows how easy it would be to
get your hands on alcohol. Towards the end of the campaign,
around October, this safety issue became the biggest
deciding message of the whole fight, and it truly resonated
with the voters out there.”

We asked WSDA
Executive Director Bob Buckley for his observations about
the pronounced wholesaler interest in this campaign and his
personal feelings about what was at stake. “I took what some
might think to be a fairly simplistic approach in talking
about this issue,” says Buckley, “but I think it also goes
immediately to what I felt was the essence of the ballot
question. When I would talk to legislative leaders who were
for Question 1, I would say things like, ‘Do you need to be
reminded we’re talking about a controlled substance here?’
And sometimes I’d ask, ‘Do you ever have trouble finding a
Dunkin’ Donuts shop in this state?’ ‘No, of course not,
they’re all over the place,’ was always the answer. ‘Well,’
I’d point out, ‘as of right now, before this ballot question
is decided, did you know package stores outnumber Dunkin’
Donuts outlets 2 to 1 in the Commonwealth? And if this thing
passes, we’re likely to go to 6 to 1. Do you feel we really
need that? And who the hell really wins if it
happens?’

“I’m often
kidded by my counterparts in other parts of the country
about all the antiquated beverage alcohol laws we have here
in Massachusetts including our three tier system that was
created as a safeguard at the end of Prohibition. And I tell
them, ‘You know, if we all abided by these laws, we’d all be
making more money. That’s one of the things our three-tier
system does for us in this state. So, go ahead and make
jokes about it being old and antiquated, but it’s there for
a reason. It’s because all the problems related to alcoholic
beverages are also old. It’s got nothing to do with anything
else. It’s not the problems that change. It’s how we get at
them that change.”

Were wholesalers
caught between a rock and a hard place in this situation,
since a number of their customers are supermarkets, we ask?
“Well, in terms of my membership, which includes all the big
guys, they all actively supported the opposition cause and
participated to the fullest,” Buckley points out. “Again, it
was for the right reasons. There were obviously some
conflicting business reasons not to do it. But the fact is
that clearer minds prevailed. What this ballot question
campaign, and the magnitude of the different aspects of the
issue, did was to pull together a lot of folks who don’t
ordinarily work closely together, to say the least. But the
greatest achievement of this entire campaign was seeing how
clearer heads kept prevailing. And that’s the bottom line,
as far as I’m concerned.

“Towards the
end, the best argument the ‘Yes’ people seemed to be putting
forth was all about the convenience bit,” says Buckley, “all
that ‘Mom should be able to buy wine with her roast’ stuff.
And I’m thinking, ‘If this is the best argument you guys can
come up with, then you’re really in deep trouble.’ That’s
when I felt we truly were going to win. Their whole campaign
used so much smoke and mirror stuff, unfounded scare
tactics, which bothered me a lot. There was so much magician
stuff, raising the right hand and pointing and waving, while
trying to prevent you from seeing what the hell the left
hand was doing. They were saying things like, ‘The liquor
industry is funding them.’ Well, yes, sure there was funding
support from a number of different liquor industry
interests, including so many of the little store guys,
fighting for their livelihoods. But what the ‘Yes’ guys
weren’t talking about was the enormous funding all coming
from what the giant corporate supermarket industry was
pumping in to their side of the argument. The total was
millions more than anything the liquor guys were pulling
together. But, like in a Rocky film, the big favorites lost,
and there’s a message here.

“Massachusetts
is still a part of this country that respects hard-working
underdogs and a legitimate fight. I guess you could say I’m
an old South Boston kid, and I’ve always loved a good fight.
But the problem with this one was it was very one-sided, yet
the underdog still won, fighting honestly. You asked me how
I feel about it? How much more satisfying can it get than
that? All I can say is that winning this fight gave me the
greatest amount of gratification, and it has nothing to do
with what I do for a living. It’s because I truly do believe
that we’re all best served if the product is tightly
controlled. And this speaks for what all my wholesaler
members thought about it, too.”

Committee member
Dick Hurley was notably effective lining up support in his
Cape Cod territory, working with local selectmen and the
entire Cape’s law enforcement community. “We got the
Barnstable County sheriff on board, right up front,” says
Hurley, “and he dragged in other sheriffs from around the
state as well as other police chiefs. Of course, it didn’t
hurt that I’m a reserve deputy and in the sheriff’s civilian
response training program. Anyway, I reached out for him,
and he agreed with our message and signed on. In short
order, we got the Yarmouth police chief, the Orleans police
chief, and so on. Before you knew it, we had the entire law
enforcement community on Cape Cod on our side. Cape Cod went
first and became a campaign model, and the model quickly
spread throughout the state, word of mouth style.

One of Hurley’s
most convincing arguments at meetings with local town
selectmen focused on some amazing statistics about
supermarket theft. “For instance, at just one Stop &
Shop store,” he points out, “the employee theft rate for
just one year was estimated at around 68%, something like
$25,OOO a year. We’re talking just employee theft. OK? And
if employees are stealing food items to this extent, what
they hell are they going to do if they are turned lose on
alcohol, which is vastly more desirable from a theft
standpoint. Now, supermarkets hire underage employees in
large numbers. They’re at the loading dock, at the
registers, all over the store. So, if $25,OOO theft, right
now, is made up of food items, I think you can quickly see
the extraordinary theft potential for alcohol if they’re
able to sell it. Also, bar codes can be shifted. I can put a
bar code on a 12-pack of beer. I can print it up on my
computer at home. Or I can just cut off the bar code from
12-pack of coke, run it through the scanner on the self
check-out. It sells me the coke, and I’ve got the
beer.”

The only time
the Stop & Shop showed up to debate him was one time
before the town board in Dennis, he remembers. “Among my
various colleagues, this just happened to be my night to
take that meeting. I had to confront five S&S corporate
people who came down from Quincy. Their corporate IT
computer guy was there. He gave his presentation. Then I got
up and started providing him and the town board with some
examples of how his system could get bypassed, including the
ones I just mentioned. Would you believe he had answers for
none of them, absolutely nothing to say?

“And I think
this demonstrates a key reason we were so successful here,
as well as in other parts of the state,” Hurley contends.
“It’s that all of our Committee messages were believable.
People we talked to could hear the sincerity in our voices,
read it on our faces. Our ads that we placed independently
in our local newspapers portrayed that. So did letters to
our local editors. And come election day, 61% of Cape Cod
voters said a resounding ‘No’ at the polls. I have no doubt
they realized we were sincere about our desire to control
the sale of alcohol for the good of their communities. The
other side came off as insincere and working from afar. We
came off as hands-on and totally committed to our
cause.”

Undoubtedly, one
of the most innovative and tireless leaders throughout the
whole campaign effort was none other than Committee Chairman
Peter Kessel, who seemed to be perpetually doing six things
at once and appearing in 25 places at the same time.
Indefatigable would be an understatement for what this guy
contributed and the way he operated. It would take a
book-length study to record all the strategic inputs,
leadership initiatives and anecdotal observations that Peter
had to offer during this whole fight. He is a born salesman,
raconteur and motivator. The reason he accepted the role of
Committee Chairman, he explains, is because, quite simply,
he sensed he was the right man with enough good ideas and a
thick enough skin for the job.

“Number one, I
saw that somebody was going to have to be his own person,”
he observes, “and be able to look in the mirror and be
comfortable with his decisions. Because many times you’re
not going to be popular, and you’re going to have to
persuade and motivate, and you’re going have to come up with
ideas and sell them, in order to get everyone to go down the
same path. And you have to have enough ideas that everyone
can participate and feel comfortable. But you also got to be
smart enough to know when to shut up, because you got a lot
of brainy people around you who will carry the ball for you.
So, there were times when I would sit back and let things
develop, and times when I forced my hand, which I’m sure
pissed almost everyone off at one time or another. But
you’re steering all the time, motivating, selling, allowing
people to see what can happen. And I was particularly
blessed on this committee, having so many people so
perfectly suited to specific job roles, like Buddy Carp, for
example, and all his remarkable work creating our campaign
website and establishing a data base that enabled us to
communicate and keep in constant touch with every retailer
in the state.

“Basically, the
vision I was trying to get everyone to share with me was all
about winning,” Peter goes on. “This is what you got to get
people thinking about in order to accomplish anything. It’s
the basic component. I come from a football background, and
have a football player’s mentality about doing things. Life
to me is a series of game situations. Like it’s first and
1O, or it’s second and three, or we just had to punt.
Sometimes, maybe we’re on the sidelines watching. But the
bottom line is you’re always involved in the game in one way
or another. There is a competitive side to me that takes on
most responsibilities and challenges, and I put blinders on
and will do everything in my power to get it done. And I
can’t say enough about how my committee responded to all
this kind of thing. I had a great committee of problem
solvers. I drew a line in the sand and told people to step
over it, and they did it. And I kept reaching and getting
them to step further and further, and felt comfortable that
they were able to do that. This was the most satisfying
thing about this remarkable group of such dedicated
volunteers, having people onboard who were willing and able
to follow the train track I was trying to lay
down.”

What were the
most memorable moments of the whole experience, we ask?
Would it be the town meeting in Seekonk with Chris Gasparro,
early in the campaign, when they persuaded the board of
selectmen to make Seekonk the first town in the Commonwealth
to actually draft a non-binding resolution, agreeing to join
the Vote No movement and not issue these licenses? “I can’t
tell you how we all walked out of that meeting hugging each
other,” Peter remembers. “It was so motivational that it
pumped me and everybody else up for days. Now, we all knew
we could get to other towns and do this.” Or was it the
taped TV commercial Vote No endorsement that Somerville
Police Chief Bob Bradley was persuaded to make only a few
weeks before the election. It was a powerhouse statement
against supermarket alcohol sales in the interests of public
safety and had such a profound vote-swinging impact in the
opinion polls? Or perhaps it was all those little grassroots
contributions done by so many campaign workers, like the guy
who volunteered to sit for a whole weekend just putting
polling place hold-up signs together for all of Norfolk
county or the guy giving a heads-up call about ‘you may want
to push this and this with this group’ or ‘this needs a
meeting in that town’ kind of thing?

Peter’s head is
still swimming with all these images. “It’s impossible to
choose among them,” he finally concludes. “All the pieces
made a big difference and, in the end, that’s how we got the
word out. It was all about grassroots. So many guys just
busted their ass. For those of us on the committee, this
took 13 months, often two-and-a-half days a week out of the
store, never mind our nights.”

But there is one
memory he will particularly treasure for the rest of his
life, he says. “I’ve never really been part of a political
thing, and I was at a good buddy’s house election night
watching the returns along with most of the committee guys.
We were up smoking cigars, and what had just happened didn’t
sink in for quite some time. Then about two in the morning,
I suddenly said to myself, “Holy Shit! Did we actually win
this thing???” And there it was in the paper, the next day.
Yes, we won. It wasn’t a mistake. For a week, all of us on
the committee were just so sky high. We could all look in
the mirror. And that’s when I felt this tremendous sense of
accomplishment, not so much for myself, but for just
participating in something that was so critically important
for this industry, and with such a wonderful group of
dedicated guys.”