Published On : Tue, Jan 8th, 2013

Wine shops in bar’s disguise mushroom around Nagpur, Excise Dept pitches for more bars

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Nagpur News: With the increasing competition in liquor business, the sellers are trying every means to push the sales forward. The Excise Department are preferring to permit more bars instead of wine shops and that too after the seekers have squeezed much liquidity from their pockets and gone through rigorous processes. The new taxes levied every other day for running bar has severely affected its income.

The Excise Deparment has for now stopped issuing licenses both for country made and foreign liquor shops. This has given rise to large number of bars with special sale counters from where the liquor is being sold at wine shop prices. While the increasing competition has led many of the bar owners to indulge in direct liquor sale, the practice is equally affecting other bars running without sale counter.

Some of these bars can be seen in Kanhan near Nagpur. The bar operators viewed that the Excise Department is on approving spree for bars which has divided the customer base to great extent.

The competition has prompted the bar owners to increase freebies to the customers. This adds to the maintenance cost on the bar owners.

In order to cope up with the customer crisis, most of bar owners have named their installations as wine shop and give out the liquor brands at shop prices.

Too costly to afford

The licenses for country made liquor are currently escalating uncontrollably. While it is being sold at Rs 50 lakh, the license rate for foreign made liquor stands at whopping Rs 1.5 crore. As the small vendors keep away from the sale process on account of its huge pricing, the big players are more than willing to get one as they consider this as one time investment to reap rich benefits ahead.