"...with the aid of modern technology, the government can lose money while selling a highly popular product over which it has a monopoly."

I'm not saying government can't have good ideas, I'm just saying it seems you end up with a lot of really, really bad ones.

How Does a Wine Monopoly Lose Money? - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

"When they are working, the kiosks dispense a limited selection of wines at limited locations and times (not on Sunday, of course!) to customers who present ID, look into a camera monitored by a state employee, breathe into a blood-alcohol meter, and swipe a credit card... In June the Wegmans supermarket chain withdrew from the kiosk program... A week ago Walmart announced that it had decided not to install 23 planned kiosks. Presumably Wegmans and Walmart had second thoughts at least partly because they want shoppers to feel like valued customers instead of suspected criminals forced to take a sobriety test....""

'via Blog this'