Mississippi’s wine and liquor delivery backlog is still rippling through stores, bars and restaurants, even after state officials said the worst technical problems at a warehouse have been fixed. As of the week ending April 12, more than 172,000 cases were still waiting to be delivered, and businesses were averaging 17 days to receive orders.
Brandi Carter, who owns Levure Bottle Shop in Jackson and handles the beverage program for a Jackson restaurant, said the delay has become part of daily business. “I’ve just reached acceptance that this is our new normal, and it’s awful,” she said.
The numbers show why that feeling has lingered. In the week ending Jan. 11, more than 51,000 cases were pending delivery in Mississippi and the wait time was three days. By March 1, the backlog had climbed to more than 220,000 cases and the average wait had stretched to 25 days. The latest figures show some improvement, but they still leave retailers waiting four to five weeks for certain orders to move through the system.
Carter said she has been dealing with delays since February, when the state’s 40-year-old warehouse began struggling after Mississippi moved away from an obsolete conveyor belt system and switched to pallets for moving cases. She said the first major wave of trouble was the worst because orders were being marked as shipped before they actually left the warehouse. “So the first big chunk was the biggest problem, because things were being marked as shipped, but they weren’t shipped,” she said. Carter added that the warehouse software was not lining up with the ordering side: “The computer program that they implemented for the warehouse wasn’t working effectively with the ordering side.”
Mississippi’s Alcoholic Beverage Control department is responsible for distributing wine and liquor to businesses that sell it, and the problems began after a new warehouse management system ran into technical trouble. The Mississippi Department of Revenue said the issues have been resolved and that the warehouse is operating at full capacity. It also said there is not an alcohol shortage, even as retailers have watched shelves thin and ordering windows tighten.
That gap has forced businesses to cut back. Josh Sorrell, who owns Spillway Wine and Spirits in Brandon, said he used to order 600 cases a day and is now limited to 100 cases per day. He said about 30% to 40% of the items he normally orders each day have been unavailable. The state has said shipments should return to normal volume within the coming weeks as retail ordering stabilizes.
For now, the pressure on stores remains real, and the fix is still ahead of them. A new warehouse is set to be completed by the end of this year and is expected to store and ship more than twice as many cases as the current facility, a capacity increase that could matter more than any short-term reassurance. Mississippi lawmakers had debated a temporary change that would have let out-of-state distributors sell and ship alcohol directly to retailers, but that proposal did not pass, leaving the state system in place while businesses wait for the warehouse to catch up.
