Here’s an idea for Downtown Memphis

While typing the post about Frank’s Liquors reopening (scroll down and you’ll see it), I hit Wikipedia’s entry on low-end fortified wine to read about Thunderbird, Night Train and other wines that the panhandlers Downtown are known to prefer. One sentence struck me as particularly interesting:

“Cities like San Francisco and Seattle have banned the sale of various of these wine products in downtown and skid row areas.”

Why can’t Memphis do the same? And ban the sale of those one-shot “airplane bottles” as well. I guarantee you that’d put a major dent in the panhandling problem here, and maybe it would cause Memphis to lose the five-star ranking that bums around the country have given our city. I nearly fell down in the alley behind my building yesterday because I slipped on an airplane bottle of citrus flavored Smirnoff vodka.

Some good news in the fight against panhandling: The manager of the Downtown Walgreens joined our Handling-Panhandling forum. Glad to have her aboard, as that corner is one of the most popular for bums in all of Downtown. Maybe we can work together with Walgreens to get something done.