Auditor General Probes Wine Kiosk Snafu

The much hyped wine kiosks have had so many problems, the state just pulled the plug on the machines, and with the holidays upon us, and the pressure to privatize state store’s mounting, it couldn’t come at a worse time for the LCB.

The big news today is the Auditor General just announced he’s investigating. He says the kiosk breakdown during the height of the holiday season has left customers high and dry, and we wanted to know why.

Fox 29’s Karen Hepp spoke to a few retailers who said they did have problems with the machines.

Basically, it takes 3 steps to get wine from them, and 3 places they say there are problems. Some problems involve the built-in breathalyzer, while other machines are not returning customer IDs.

Karen spoke to the manufacturer who says the pilot program worked very well at first, when it launched this past summer, but they apparently got a bad batch of resisters, which became a problem.

The PLCB says with the higher volume of people who use the machines during the holidays, they did not want people to have bad experiences, so they took the drastic measure to shut them down until they are fixed.

Later on at 6pm, Karen spoke to Auditor General Jack Wagner on the telephone about his investigation. Click the second video tab to watch that interview.