Pennsylvania Ping!
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Posted on 03/09/2022 9:54:44 AM PST by Tired of Taxes
When you sell liquor in Pennsylvania, you have only one true customer: the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Even if you buy a cocktail at a bar, the establishment had to buy that booze from the state-run liquor store, just like you.
So when Governor Tom Wolf urged the PLCB to stop buying and selling Russian-sourced products to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it put Margaret Bayuk in a tight spot.
Bayuk is a 74-year-old Slovakian immigrant and longtime resident of Beaver Falls, Pa. She’s also the sole proprietor of Ustianochka Vodka, distilled and bottled in Russia and exclusively sold in Pennsylvania. It retails for $16.99 a bottle. During the pandemic, she has averaged a modest 20 cases per week in statewide sales, mostly around Pittsburgh.
But now that Bayuk’s lone customer has blacklisted her, she’s sitting on roughly 30,000 bottles of the stuff. Last week she faxed Gov. Wolf a letter asking him to reconsider.
“Why are you sanctioning me?” Bayuk wrote. “I am definitely not an oligarch. We own no yachts (or any boats), or luxury cars (my Odyssey has 268,000 miles) and we are paying off a home mortgage like most Americans.”
Ustianochka and Russian Standard are the only two brands affected by the PLCB’s decision, which Bayuk first learned of from The Inquirer on Feb. 27. The next morning, her PLCB buyer called her to explain apologetically that Bayuk’s vodka had been pulled off the shelf and put in a backroom.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
They’ll keep.
Hunter Biden is on the way over.
Yes but this virtue signaling is ruining this woman and that isn’t right. State stores should be done away with.
Did anyone say it couldn’t be consumed?
“They’ll keep.”
Kind of a heartless comment there, BL. She invested quite a bit in that inventory that is now frozen out of the market. Maybe she spent $8 per bottle for that inventory — that’s almost a quarter million dollars of her savings tied up in that inventory. Her income from her sales has gone to zero and she’s stuck with inventory that won’t move for Lord knows how long.
The state could have dictated “No more imports, but you are allowed to sell existing inventory until it is gone.”
How well does Vodka age?
There are +10,000 ethnic Russians in Lancaster PA.
They drink. Shouldn’t be a problem.
Pennsylvania Ping!
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She could start a series of books called “the vodka diaries”. Drink a bottle and then write in a diary, then sel. To Russia for light resding material at twice the price of the bottles lol
Not to mention if there are any Uzbeks around.
You think so?
Chelsea Handler will be right over.
Yep , Nancy and Hillary will buy all you got ,LOL
30,000 bottles? Is she single?
And what an idiotic state. All liquor sales have to be a state operation?
If she’s not, her husband is set.
“NOW...Stop with the common sense “
It’s not a thinking functioning State anymore, it’s an angry vicious mob.
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