Monday, October 6, 2014

how the department of liquor control is like the public library

Say what you will about Montgomery County's liquor laws, but one benefit is that you can search the inventory of available beverages at all 30 locations in the county via their website. You can see all of the products available in the county, and what each Department of Liquor Control store has in stock.
I was thinking about making an old fashioned. Screenshots from my computer.
After a few minutes of clicking around, I realized that the interface felt really familiar. So I visited the Montgomery County Public Library's site, where you can also see what books are available, and which libraries have them.
I always have to read the book before seeing the movie.
I was struck by how similar their websites are. It's cool that Montgomery County makes it as easy to find and locate booze as they do books. On the other hand, it would be nice if there were more than 30 places to buy bourbon in a county of one million people. (Especially because, according to the DLC website, the downtown Silver Spring branch doesn't have the one I'm looking for.)

I wouldn't recommend consuming these two things together.

4 comments:

Robert said...

We have thirty County liquor stores but only 22 libraries, and one of the libraries is at the jail, so that probably shouldn't count. I'd say we are more deficient for libraries than liquor stores.

Of course, if your local library branch doesn't have the book you want, you can place a "hold" and get it delivered from another branch to your branch. I wonder if the liquor stores do that?

Bethany said...

Sometimes the county stores will do special orders for you, but it depends on how busy they are and whether it's worth their time.

Woody Brosnan said...

And we only have six police stations and 30 liquor stores. And on and on and on. It's ridiculous to compare the number of libraries to liquor stores.

Dan Reed said...

That would be a valid complaint, but I wasn't comparing the number of libraries to liquor stores, but rather the similarity between liquor stores and libraries when they're both run by the county.