Two Portland residents are trying, for the second time in three years, to get Oregon voters to let grocery stores sell hard liquor. Before you get excited about buying vodka next to your vegetables, it's worth knowing something neither of the state's two prior attempts at this have talked about much: Washington already ran this exact experiment in 2012, and it's the best real-world data we have on what actually happens to prices when a state hands liquor sales over to grocery stores. It isn't the simple, prices-go-down story you'd expect.

David John Allison and Kyle LoCascio, both of Portland, filed a new prospective petition this year called the "Customer Choice and Convenience Act of 2028." In July, they cleared the first procedural hurdle, submitting 1,472 sponsorship signatures — more than the 1,000 required to move into the ballot title process. The Oregon Attorney General's office issued a draft ballot title on July 31.

The measure would let grocery stores larger than 4,000 square feet that already sell beer, wine or cider apply for licenses to sell bottled distilled liquor and low-proof spirits. Retailers would set their own prices and buy through a new wholesale channel, instead of the current system, where the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission centrally purchases and warehouses spirits for distribution through more than 280 independently operated retail liquor stores. Under the proposal, licensed retailers would pay OLCC a monthly fee tied to the agency's average markup, with revenue beyond that directed to sobering centers, substance-use prevention and addiction-treatment programs.

This isn't the pair's first attempt. They filed a nearly identical measure, Initiative Petition 43, aimed at the November 2026 general election. That one needed 117,173 valid signatures to qualify — a much higher bar than the 2028 filing has cleared so far — and it never appears to have gathered them; there's no public record of IP 43 submitting signatures, and it's absent from the 2026 ballot. At the time, the Northwest Grocery Retail Association, the industry group that represents Oregon grocers and would typically be expected to back this kind of measure, said it had no connection to the campaign. "We don't know who they are," CEO Amanda Dalton told the Oregon Journalism Project in August 2025. 

Allison and LoCascio never established a campaign website or registered a political action committee for that effort, both standard steps for a ballot campaign expected to raise the money it takes to gather six-figure signature counts. It's not yet clear whether the 2028 refiling has a real campaign infrastructure behind it, as the pair didn’t respond to multiple attempts to contact them.

Oregon is one of a shrinking number of states, along with Idaho and Montana, that still sells spirits through a state-licensed store system. Washington ended its version of that system in 2012 after voters approved Initiative 1183, shifting liquor sales to private retailers, including grocery stores, drugstores and big-box chains.

The clearest answer to "did it save people money" comes from a series of peer-reviewed studies by the Alcohol Research Group, a nonprofit research center affiliated with the Public Health Institute. Comparing prices before and after the change, researchers found Washington liquor prices rose an average of 15.5% for standard 750-milliliter bottles and 4.7% for 1.75-liter bottles in the first two years after privatization — while neighboring Oregon and Idaho, which didn't change their systems, saw only small price movements over the same period, evidence the increase was tied to privatization itself rather than a regional trend. A follow-up study found prices kept climbing, up another 3.9% to 6.5% between 2014 and 2016. Washington's own Department of Revenue data shows the average price per liter rose from $21.35 in June 2011 to $24.67 by March 2014, an increase of about 15.6% — in line with the Alcohol Research Group's academic findings for the same period.

The increase wasn't uniform across every kind of store, which is the detail that matters most for anyone picturing convenient one-stop shopping. Dr. William Kerr, the researcher behind the original Alcohol Research Group pricing studies, confirmed the pattern directly to Stumptown Savings: liquor superstores like Total Wine, where a wide range of products was available, ended up pricing close to what the old state-run system charged, and warehouse clubs like Costco, which carried a smaller selection, did too. Supermarkets were a different story — Kerr told us they offered a limited range of products at significantly higher prices, the exact retail category Oregon's measure targets. In other words, the "convenience" pitch and the "savings" pitch point in different directions: you may get to skip a separate stop, but you're less likely to get the superstore's price while doing it, and you'll likely have fewer options besides.

The price increases came from new taxes and fees written into Washington's initiative to replace the revenue the state used to collect from running its own stores, not from grocers simply marking prices up for the fun of it. Oregon's proposal includes a similar mechanism — a monthly fee tied to OLCC's markup — so a similar dynamic is plausible here, though the exact fee structure and how it would compare to Washington's isn't spelled out in the draft ballot title.

A 2019 working paper from researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago modeled the effect on Washington consumers directly and found evidence that privatization made the median Washington resident worse off overall, despite voters approving the measure by a 16-point margin.

Kerr also pointed us toward a separate, peer-reviewed public-health angle that hasn't come up in Oregon's debate so far: a 2020 study published in the journal Addiction found that after privatization, Washington's metropolitan counties saw a measurably larger increase in alcohol-related accidental-injury hospitalizations than neighboring Oregon counties saw over the same period — a gap researchers didn't find in rural counties, where the number of stores selling liquor grew far less. The takeaway isn't that grocery-store liquor sales are inherently dangerous, but that where availability expands the most, health researchers have found real, measurable costs beyond the price tag.

Grocery-backed efforts to privatize Oregon liquor sales have failed repeatedly, including a well-organized 2022 campaign called "Oregonians for Competition," backed by Lynn Gust, the retired president of Fred Meyer Stores, which cleared a ballot title but ultimately fell short on signatures. That campaign had real industry money and a public presence behind it. The current effort, so far, does not appear to have either.

The Northwest Grocery Retail Association, the industry group that represents Oregon grocers, confirmed to Stumptown Savings that it still hasn't spoken with Allison or LoCascio about their campaign — the same disconnect reporters found during their 2026 attempt. That said, NGRA CEO Amanda Dalton made clear the group's lack of involvement with this particular pair isn't a lack of interest in the underlying idea. NGRA continues to support liquor privatization broadly, she told us, pointing to grocers' decades-long record selling beer and wine responsibly.

"Oregon grocers are responsible and reliable vendors," Dalton said, arguing privatization would boost tax revenue and get the state out of the liquor business entirely. She also directly addressed the Washington comparison, telling us the industry has "learned lessons" from how neighboring states handled it, and that a properly written Oregon measure could avoid those pitfalls while benefiting consumers, local distillers and neighborhood grocers alike. She didn't specify what "properly written" would mean in practice, or whether Allison and LoCascio's version qualifies.

That gap — real industry appetite for privatization in general, paired with zero visible industry involvement in the only active campaign trying to make it happen — is the clearest read on where this stands. Whether that changes for 2028 remains to be seen.

If you're a Portland shopper hoping grocery-store liquor means a cheaper, easier bottle of something for your next dinner party, Washington's experience suggests the reality is more mixed: more convenience, yes, but higher prices, and the fee structure Oregon eventually settles on would matter as much as the ballot language itself.

Stumptown Savings attempted to reach chief petitioners David Allison and Kyle LoCascio directly by phone, text and social media; neither had responded by publication. OLCC had not responded either. We'll update this piece if that changes.

If you've ever argued about this with a friend, send them this. Half the people talking about grocery-store liquor sales don't know Washington already ran the experiment — or what it actually did to prices. Forward it along, or share the link: stumptownsavings.com/p/portland-oregon-liquor-privatization-petition-washington-data-2026