Utah Has 1.94 Liquor Stores Per 100k People. Connecticut Has 32. Here's the Legal Reason.

Most US states let anyone open a liquor store under a state-issued license, the same way any other retail business gets licensed. Seventeen states do something different: the state government itself controls part or all of the alcohol supply chain, in some cases running the actual retail stores. This is public, well-documented policy — not a secret — but it's rarely mapped directly against where the physical stores actually sit. Crawlora's Google Maps dataset turns out to encode the split almost by accident, in its own category labels.

The category tags already know which states are "control states"

State	state_liquor_store listings	NABCA control state?
Virginia	396	Yes — full retail control
Alabama	158	Yes — full retail control
Ohio	99	Yes — full retail control
Pennsylvania	96	Yes — full retail control
New Hampshire	67	Yes — full retail control
Idaho	35	Yes — full retail control
North Carolina	23	Yes — full retail control
Michigan	16	Yes — full retail control
Vermont	13	Yes — full retail control
Utah	11	Yes — full retail control
Montana	8	Yes — full retail control
Oregon	8	Yes — full retail control
New York	11	No — a handful of county-level ABC-style listings
California	7	No — likely mislabeled outliers

We didn't tell the dataset which states are control states — we queried the raw category facet first, saw a state_liquor_store tag with 307 total US listings, and only then checked which states it concentrated in. The overlap with NABCA's published list is close to perfect: every one of the 12 states with more than 5 state_liquor_store listings is an independently documented full-retail-control state, and every other state with a large private liquor market shows almost none.

The reverse undercount is just as important. Query category=liquor_store alone — the obvious, generic search — and Virginia shows just 36 listings, and Utah shows 57, both near the bottom of all 51 jurisdictions. Take that at face value and you'd conclude those states barely sell liquor at retail. What's actually happening is the same tagging split this series already found with Utah's LDS meetinghouses (mostly tagged christian_church, not the generic church): Virginia's and Utah's real retail stores exist, they're just tagged under a different, more specific category. Sum all three relevant categories — liquor_store, state_liquor_store, alcohol_retail_monopoly — and Virginia's real total is 432, Utah's is 68. Still low (that's the actual finding, not an artifact), but no longer an accident of which bucket a listing happened to land in.

Not all "control" is equal — and the data can tell the difference

Rank	State	Combined listings	Per 100k residents	Regulatory type
1	Connecticut	1,176	32.00	License
2	District of Columbia	198	28.20	License
3	Kansas	795	26.76	License
4	Delaware	281	26.71	License
5	Colorado	1,469	24.42	License
6	Mississippi	708	24.06	Control — wholesale only
7	Kentucky	1,040	22.67	License
8	South Carolina	1,162	21.21	License
9	Massachusetts	1,489	20.87	License
10	Rhode Island	225	20.53	License
…	(31 states omitted)
42	Oregon	196	4.59	Control — full retail
43	Maine	61	4.40	Control — wholesale only
44	West Virginia	73	4.12	Control — wholesale only
45	Ohio	451	3.80	Control — full retail
46	New Mexico	80	3.76	License
47	Washington	297	3.73	License
48	Arizona	220	2.90	License
49	Idaho	58	2.90	Control — full retail
50	Hawaii	31	2.16	License
51	Utah	68	1.94	Control — full retail

Show the full 51-jurisdiction ranking

Rank	State	Per 100k residents
1	Connecticut	32.00
2	District of Columbia	28.20
3	Kansas	26.76
4	Delaware	26.71
5	Colorado	24.42
6	Mississippi	24.06
7	Kentucky	22.67
8	South Carolina	21.21
9	Massachusetts	20.87
10	Rhode Island	20.53
11	New Jersey	19.86
12	Maryland	19.26
13	Minnesota	18.80
14	Alabama	17.57
15	Oklahoma	17.31
16	Michigan	16.39
17	North Dakota	15.32
18	Alaska	15.13
19	Arkansas	15.09
20	Indiana	14.96
21	New York	14.62
22	Illinois	14.36
23	California	13.17
24	Georgia	12.59
25	Iowa	12.25
26	Texas	12.04
27	Missouri	12.01
28	South Dakota	12.00
29	Tennessee	11.80
30	Wyoming	11.74
31	Vermont	11.57
32	Montana	11.32
33	Nebraska	11.27
34	Florida	11.18
35	Wisconsin	10.26
36	Louisiana	7.05
37	Nevada	6.18
38	Pennsylvania	5.38
39	North Carolina	4.95
40	Virginia	4.90
41	New Hampshire	4.76
42	Oregon	4.59
43	Maine	4.40
44	West Virginia	4.12
45	Ohio	3.80
46	New Mexico	3.76
47	Washington	3.73
48	Arizona	2.90
49	Idaho	2.90
50	Hawaii	2.16
51	Utah	1.94

Look at ranks 38 through 51: nine of the bottom fourteen states are full-retail-control states (Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Oregon, Ohio, Idaho, Utah), interrupted only by a handful of license states with their own reasons for low density (Louisiana, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii — mostly a mix of low population density and different licensing economics we didn't investigate here). Mississippi, by contrast, sits at rank 6 — near the very top, ahead of Massachusetts and South Carolina — despite technically being one of NABCA's 17 control jurisdictions.

This is a documented, intentional policy outcome

That's a rare thing in this data series: a finding where the industry's own stated policy rationale and the live, measured geography line up almost exactly. Full-retail-control states aren't quietly ending up with fewer stores by accident — lower outlet density is the explicit, publicly stated goal of the policy, and the map is doing what it says on the label.

How we did this, and the caveats

Every number above comes from a live search/facets call against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset, 2026-08-27 snapshot, cross-referenced against US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 (July 1, 2025) state population estimates and NABCA's published control-state list.

Caveats worth stating plainly: this measures physical retail location count, not sales volume, revenue, or per-location size — a state with fewer, larger stores could in principle sell just as much alcohol per capita as a state with many small ones; NABCA's own cited figures put control jurisdictions at roughly 24.7% of US population and 23.0% of distilled spirit sales, a close match, but volume-per-store isn't something this dataset measures directly. Pennsylvania's Fine Wine & Good Spirits chain is independently documented at roughly 600 physical stores, while our combined total for Pennsylvania is 704 (606 liquor_store + 96 state_liquor_store + 2 alcohol_retail_monopoly) — a reasonable match once you allow for a state's stores sometimes being tagged under the generic category instead of the specific one, but not an exact reconciliation, and a reminder that Google's own category tagging isn't perfectly consistent state to state. North Carolina's and a few other states' local ABC boards operate somewhat independently county to county, which this state-level rollup doesn't break out. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing, so a re-pull months from now will show different totals.

If you want to run your own consolidation or density checks on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our bank branch density, church density, and Germany pharmacy law studies.

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