Green’s Discount Beverages to open third location in Columbia. Here’s where
Green’s Discount Beverages, a downtown Columbia liquor store since 1984, is opening a third location in the Capital City.
The Atlanta-based Green’s plans to open the store in the Landmark Square shopping center on Garners Ferry Road across from the Dorn Veterans Administration Medical Center. The shopping center also hosts Goodwill, Ross and Burkes Outlet.
Gary Kangas, manager of the store at 400 Assembly St. near the University of South Carolina, said the new store should open in August.
“We’ve been planning this for two years,” he said.
The Garners Ferry store will be double the size of the 10,000-square-foot Assembly Street location, Kangas said.
It will be third Green’s location in Columbia — sort of.
There’s one other Green’s store in Columbia, at 4012 Fernandina Road off Interstate 26.
But the Greenbaum family, which opened their first store in Atlanta in the 1930s, owns only the beer and wine side of Green’s Beverage Warehouse on Fernandina Road, not the liquor side.
South Carolina law requires that liquor be sold in separate locations from other products, such as beer and wine.
State law used to allow only three liquor licenses per company in an effort to protect small businesses. But in 2017, the S.C. Supreme Court overturned that statute in a suit brought by national liquor store chain Total Wine & More.
Green’s stores were born in 1937, when Leonard Greenbaum opened Green’s Package store on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown Atlanta and then another on Buford Highway in the 1960s, when his son Jerry took took the helm of the business, according to the Green’s website.
In 1977, the company opened a store in Myrtle Beach, then in Greenville in 1983.
The downtown Columbia store was built next to California Dreaming, a landmark restaurant Greenbaum founded in a former railroad depot. He went on to open 20 restaurants across the Southeast under the California Dreaming label.
In 2003, Green’s opened the pallet-based beer and wine warehouse on Fernandina Road.
This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 5:30 AM.