Oregon is a control state. The OLCC buys every bottle of distilled spirits sold here, warehouses it, sets its price, and supplies roughly 280 independently operated agent stores. Agents do not own the inventory and cannot mark a bottle up or down. Compensation is a commission rate fixed by statute.
That makes the state's sales file an unusually complete record of an unusually constrained business. It reports $96,780,878 of spirits across your 2 stores over 83 months, and it reports the same for every competitor you have. What it cannot report is anything you actually decide: your wine and beer assortment, your cigar and accessory range, what any of it costs you, or what you keep.
So this report does two things. It uses the state file for the one thing it is uniquely good at, which is showing you exactly where you sit against every other agent in Oregon. And it is explicit that the business those numbers describe is the third you control least.
Portland store 1182 and Gladstone store 1256 both trade as Hollywood Beverage. Read the file store by store, as its structure invites, and the larger one looks like the whole company at 71.2% of your actual spirits volume.
In a control state the spirits business runs on the state's terms. The OLCC purchases from distilleries, warehouses the product, prices it, and places it in your store as its own inventory. You cannot discount a slow bottle, cannot mark up a scarce one, and cannot negotiate cost. Your compensation is a commission percentage written into Oregon Revised Statutes.
Every ordinary retail lever is therefore unavailable on the majority of your floor's headline category. No buying advantage, no pricing strategy, no margin management. What remains is footfall and mix, and mix only within a price list you did not write.
Roughly 280 agent stores operate in Oregon and the state publishes sales for all of them. That means the question most retailers can never answer, which is what the shop across town actually sells, is answerable here exactly, every month, going back 83 months.
| Forward play | What the record prices it at | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Improve your spirits margin | Not available in Oregon. The state owns the inventory, sets the retail price and sets your commission by statute. There is no margin here to improve, which is the single most important fact about this business model. | Rejected |
| Discount slow-moving spirits to clear them | Also unavailable. Agents cannot mark bottles up or down. The pricing lever that would be obvious in any other retail category does not exist on this shelf. | Rejected |
| Negotiate better spirits buying terms | There is no buying relationship to negotiate. The OLCC purchases from distilleries and supplies agent stores with state-owned stock, so cost of goods is not a variable you hold. | Rejected |
| Open a third location | Agent appointments are limited and awarded through a separate periodic open recruitment, not opened at will. Roughly 280 exist statewide and you already hold two of them, which is the scarce asset rather than the growth path. | Rejected |
| Read the state file as a scorecard for your own performance | It measures the constrained third of your business at one store at a time. Read store by store it describes 71.2% of you, and read completely it still says nothing about the categories you actually price. | Rejected |
| Shift floor space from spirits to private categories | Structurally sensible and unprovable from outside. We can see what the state pays you and not what your wine, beer and accessory business earns, so recommending a reallocation would be reasoning dressed as analysis. | Untestable |
| Build the RTD and non-alcoholic ranges | The national direction is clear, with spirits RTDs up 14% and non-alcoholic up 19.2% while every traditional category fell. Whether you are already there is in your point-of-sale data and nowhere else. | Untestable |
| Defend and grow the licensee channel | Genuinely valuable and the natural follow-on. Licensee volume moves in named accounts, the state file shows the movement monthly for every competitor, and commission rates differ by channel so mix changes earnings on identical volume. It is second only because it is the output of the map below rather than a separate action. | Second |
| Use the state census as a competitor map for both markets | The only recommendation here that the available data fully supports. Oregon publishes monthly sales for roughly 280 agent stores including every competitor in Portland and Gladstone , split by licensee and public channel. No other retail sector has a complete competitor census, it costs nothing, and it answers the question you cannot otherwise ask: who is taking what, from whom, and in which month. | Pursue |
That is worth more pointed outward than inward. Used on yourself it measures the constrained third of your business. Used on the market it tells you which competitors are growing, which are shrinking, and specifically which are taking or losing the restaurant and bar accounts that move in identifiable, nameable blocks.
US alcohol volumes fell 5% in 2025. Spirits fell 4%, beer and wine 6% each. Over the same period spirits-based ready-to-drink rose 14%, and non-alcoholic beer, wine and spirits rose 19.2% to pass a billion dollars off-premise. Two thirds of retailers now name RTDs as the biggest shift in the category and more than half are expanding shelf space for them.
An operator reading only the state file would see a declining business. That is a true statement about spirits and a misleading one about beverage retail, because the growth moved into aisles the state does not track.
First: spirits is the traffic driver. People come for the bottle and buy the mixer on the way past, so the constrained category earns its floor space by bringing the customer through the door. Fair, and it argues for attention to spirits footfall rather than to spirits margin, which does not exist.
Second: a state agency at scale is a defensible annuity. Appointments are limited and awarded through periodic recruitment, roughly 280 exist in the whole state, and you hold two. A fixed commission on volume you already have is worth defending before chasing margin elsewhere. This is a genuine opposite view and a reasonable one.
Third, and strongest: we cannot see your private categories, so we cannot prove they matter more. Everything above about wine, beer and accessories is structural reasoning about a control state, not measurement of your business. That is precisely why the recommendation below is not a mix recommendation. It is the one action the data we do hold can actually support.
Each play below was tested against the state file, the statute and published category data. Several are rejected not because they would not work but because Oregon does not permit them, which is a kind of clarity most markets do not offer.
The file covers every agent in Oregon monthly. For Portland and Gladstone separately, that means you can see exactly which nearby stores are gaining and losing, and on which channel. The licensee line matters most here because restaurant and bar volume moves in named accounts rather than as diffuse market drift, so a change there has somebody's name on it and can be acted on.
That is free, it is public, and it is the analysis this dataset is genuinely built for. It costs an afternoon and no data of yours leaves the building.
If a finding here is wrong, telling us so is worth as much to us as the numbers. This is built from a state file and a statute, and you are the only person who can correct what they leave out.
We are Scalable OS. We work with public records: state liquor sales records and published industry volume data. From those we reconstruct from them what is actually happening inside a business and the market around it. Then we send that to the business, unsolicited, before there is any relationship at all.
The reason is straightforward. The analysis in this document is the kind that normally arrives after a retainer, a discovery phase and a scoping call, which means most independent operators never see it at any point in their working lives. It is not expensive to produce, because the underlying records are public and free. It is that nobody has a reason to produce it for you until you are already a client. We would rather demonstrate the work than describe it.
There is a second reason, and it is the one that decided the shape of this document: nothing in it was requested. A search engine or an assistant answers the question you thought to ask. This report exists to raise the ones nobody inside your business has had a reason to ask, because the state can tell you exactly what every competitor sold, and nothing at all about what you earned.
The map costs an afternoon; two numbers open the other half
Send us The figures below, each one an input to a number this report could not compute from the public record: gross profit by category, monthly, for 24 months; state commission received per month, held separate from private-category gross profit; linear feet of shelf and dollars of buying capital committed by category; unit and gross-profit trend for RTD and non-alcoholic categories, monthly, since those are the lines the state does not price; commission income by month, split licensee versus public, for 24 months; licensee case volume by account, monthly; share of total gross profit made up of state commission. and we will send back this same review rebuilt on your actual numbers: