By Jon Lowen, co-founder and co-CEO of Surfside
Every year, the BevAlc industry publishes another forecast mapping distribution footprints and allocating media budgets. And almost every year, those plans are built on the same assumption: that chains and warehouse clubs define the market.
Across more than 200,000 off-premise outlets in the U.S., including roughly 150,000 convenience stores and more than 40,000 liquor stores, independent and regional retailers make up the majority of the physical retail footprint. These fragmented, locally operated businesses represent the primary environment where alcohol is actually bought and sold in America.
Call it the Retail Majority
It’s no mystery why this segment has been systematically underweighted. Fragmentation is expensive to solve.
When thousands of independent retailers operate on disconnected systems with no unified data layer, they are functionally invisible to the brand-planning process. Media dollars flow to where measurement exists. For years, that meant walled gardens and delivery platforms that aggregate demand across fragmented retailers.
The result is a structural misalignment that has compounded for years. Brands invest where they can prove returns. In other words, where infrastructure exists and capital concentrates. And the independent retailer, despite representing the majority of transactions, has remained largely outside that loop.
What’s changing now is the infrastructure layer itself
Independent and regional retailers are digitizing at an accelerating pace, building ecommerce, loyalty programs, POS-connected data and in-store media capabilities that didn’t exist five years ago. For the first time, the Retail Majority is becoming addressable, measurable and activatable as a network.
That changes the strategy for every brand-planning team in this industry.
The Retail Majority is clearly larger than the scaled chains by transaction volume, but it’s also different in a way that matters for brand building. Specialty liquor stores are where discovery happens, where staff recommendations move a consumer from curiosity to trial, and where a curated assortment introduces a shopper to a brand that would never surface in a grocery reset.
Regional grocery is where repeat purchase behavior is established. That’s where the stock-up trip converts a trial into a habit. These are active drivers of category growth, particularly in the premium and craft segments where margin and long-term brand equity are actually built.
Brand building in BevAlc starts locally
The Retail Majority has always been the engine of this industry. What’s changing now is the ability to reach it with precision, measure it with rigor and activate against it with the same sophistication that brands have applied to walled gardens for the past decade.
That shift has real implications for how budgets get allocated. The gap between where transactions happen and where media dollars flow has persisted largely because the infrastructure to close it didn’t exist. Now it does.
At this point, the question is no longer whether the Retail Majority can be part of a modern media strategy, but whether brands are willing to treat it as central to one. Closing that gap is no longer a technology challenge. It’s a prioritization decision.
