Whisky Shop experience

Cheers @bourbondrinker! Experiences of staff and management whisk(e)y knowledge and of the availability of whisky sampling within the stores vary vastly from place to place, not only from country to country, but even within a relatively small geographical area of differing jurisdictions. Where I live, for example, has different whisky store cultures within my own Maryland Montgomery County (a county control system with excellent pricing but only so-so selection, and extremely limited product sampling), 15 miles away Washington, DC, with individual laissez-faire stores and frequent sampling available, 10 miles away State of Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) state-wide alcoholic beverages system, and 40 miles away Baltimore, Maryland, with a laissez-faire store by store system. There are advantages and disadvantages among the four jurisdictions depending upon where I choose to shop. If I want whisky I can buy in Montgomery County, I will usually buy it there, for (thus far) some of the best prices in the world. There are a lot of whiskies I have bought in Baltimore and in DC because I cannot get them in Montgomery County though. Within the laissez-faire jurisdictions, there are some stores with very knowledgeable whisky experts, and many stores without very knowledgeable staff. You learn the lay of the land and then shop where it will best serve your purposes with respect to price and availability.

@Victor thanks for the reply. I saw the discussion labeled "boring" and thought to start a bit of a different discussion, just to stear up the waters.

I'm going to go the opposite direction here.

There's a speciality store here in Sydney that use to flat out knock out the competition with knowledge, range, service and customer samples. Not anymore, due to staff turn over it's turned into a pretty lame store. The staff are more interested drinking the samples themselves while ignoring customers.

I've next'd them

In Sweden we have our monopoly so there is no tasting in-store of anything. Selection varies from store to store but they all share the same catalog for orders and there's over 1500 whiskies available. The staff is always friendly and educated in a general sense. Sometimes you'll get one specialized in whisky but more often not. They tend to be more well versed in beer and wine since that's probably what makes a majority of their sells.

@Frost you should feel happy that the staff is drinking away the profits. Here in the state of Pennsylvania (US) the state controls the liquor system. Stores are mainly pushing wine. Whiskey is an afterthought. Here is an example of how things are here. I was in my local store. I asked about a particular bottle of liquor they had at the counter. The woman sales clerk said she didn't know anything about it. She said she didn't drink alcohol !

If anyone ever visits Belgium, it is a Mecca for the Whisky shop enthusiast. It seems that there are scant zoning laws so that anyone can start his own shop almost anywhere, even within a residential suburban area. Most of these stores have an amazingly knowledgeable owner/operator, most let you taste and have a wide variety of open samples. Best of all most of these are not too far from one another. You can probably visit 10 fantastic whisky shops in 2-3 days max. For a list of the main shops and links thereto see whisky.over-blog.com/focusboutiques.html (also has reviews of each stores, but in French). I have visited almost every one of these and the welcome is always great.

@olivier thanks!!Great information!

@olivier, yes, thanks for providing a great deal of very useful information in a very attractive manner.