Stop & Shop Wants to Stock Beer, Wine in Danvers Store

Milk, bread, eggs...beer?

You'll be able to add beer and wine to your shopping list at the Danvers Stop & Shop if the store is successful in getting a license transfer approved by the Board of Selectmen this week.

The board reconvenes from its summer recess Tuesday and one of the hearings on the agenda is for a transfer of the beer and wine package store license last held by the owners of the Country Store & Wine Shoppe on Wenham Street to the supermarket just off routes 1 and 62.

The law that essentially prevents supermarkets in Mass. from selling alcohol is a restriction on the number of off-premise or package store licenses a single business entity can hold.

That law, however, was changed by the state legislature in 2011 in a compromise between opposing interests in the liquor industry to incrementally increase the number of licenses a business can hold and added in a $5,000 state fee per license over three. Effective in 2012, that went from three to five licenses, in 2016 it will increase to seven and then nine in 2019.

Stop & Shop does sell alcohol at three of its other Mass. stores -- Malden, Quincy and Hingham -- and was actually rebuffed by Harwich selectmen this spring on a license transfer that would have allowed for alcohol sales at the location in East Harwich.

In Danvers, if you do most of your shopping at McKinnon's, you can pick up some beer and wine while you're there, but otherwise on the North Shore, your one-stop shopping options are pretty limited.

Trader Joe's in Peabody and the Crosby's Markets in South Hamilton, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Marblehead and Georgetown, along with several other smaller individual grocery stores, stock alcohol.

Tuesday's hearings get underway at 6 p.m. in the Toomey Room at Town Hall.

[Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect a correction.]