Most restaurants that serve alcohol make a significant amount of money on the sale of booze. Bloomberg Businessweek cites studies that show most restaurants make around 30% of their revenue from the sale of booze. You can easily look up the prices of wines in Pennsylvania and see the insane mark-ups some establishments in this area put on their wine lists. While we can’t exactly find out how much money Lehigh Valley restaurants make, or how much they make on their booze sales, what we can find out is just how much booze they buy, giving you a good idea of their vitality. We received info from the state that details the sales records of wine and spirits to the top 200 or so restaurants in the Lehigh Valley, and boy are these numbers interesting. Here’s some interesting facts and take-aways. You can download the full reports below.
Platinum Plus, y’know, the Allentown strip club with a prostitution problem? They bought, by far, the most alcohol out of anyone in the entirety of Lehigh County. They purchased $544,679.00 worth of booze. Coming in at a distant second? Melt, with $364.093.00. The now-shuttered King George Inn? Only $1,584. Somehow, Sangria, which closed down, spent over $40,000, out-purchasing many restaurants who are currently still open and not constantly empty (as Sangria seemed to be).
Many of the top spenders in Lehigh County aren’t a big surprise. Pacifico? $78k Cosmo? $82k. Brew Works? Also at $82k. But some of them are a bit surprising. The Glasbern Inn bought $86,000 worth of booze last year, with 77% of that resulting in 5,528 bottles of wine. A members-only social club in Emmaus, the Mercantile Club, astounding purchased almost $80,000, or over 6,500 bottles of liquor.
And then there’s Northampton County. The winner here, of course, is the Sands. The spent nearly $1.9 million on booze in 12 months, which accounted for 55,668 bottles of liquor and 56,043 bottles of wine. If you stacked all of those bottles on top of one another it’d be nearly four times as high as Mount Everest. Blue Grill House and Wine Bar comes in 2nd place for Northampton County sales, with a paltry-in-comparison $390,403.07 in purchases. The other top buyers are all to be expected: Vision Bar ($273k), Hotel Bethlehem ($236k), Sette Luna ($197k), Brew Works ($160k), etc. One hilarious top buyer: Ripper’s Pub, one of the diviest of dives, bought over $97,000 in liquor last year. Someone is making a mint on that place.
Go ahead and take a look around at the numbers, they’re pretty interesting. See anything worth noting? Post it in the comments below.
2 comments
Why is Apollo on the Lehigh County list? They are in Northampton as is Edge, Rippers, Hotel B, Bethlehem Brew works etc.
Kind of odd that the LCB wouldn’t know that.
That’s actually an interesting observation. For some reason the LCB lists that license as Lehigh County. That particular area of Broad Street had weird county-line registrations, although according to the state’s maps the county line ends right after the Monocacy. Perhaps they go by an old boundary? Honestly not sure about that one.