‘It’s an adult candy store’: Columbia’s third Green’s Beverages store opens Friday

Lock Reddic, president of Green’s Beverages, has run the family liquor store business for 30 years. But as retail has changed, Reddic wants the newest Green’s to be unlike the rest.

“We feel like we got it right this time,” said Reddic.

The new Green’s Beverages on Garner’s Ferry Road in the Landmark Square shopping center is 18,500 square feet of almost every alcoholic beverage on the market.

“It is an adult candy store, but we’re trying to make it where females and males can come in and enjoy the same shopping experience,” said Reddic.

The store will feature lowered shelves, brighter lighting, wider aisles, projectors streaming advertisements behind the counters and six registers spanning what was three different retail spaces. Reddic said he wanted to eliminate the “liquor store feel” and offer a “pristine” environment for specifically female shoppers to feel safer than in other liquor stores.

The building is divided into a wine and liquor side and a beer side that have two different entrances. The wine and liquor store will open Friday, but the beer side is still waiting for licensing. Reddic expects it to open in the next week and a half.

“Wine shoppers might not want to go into a beer store, which is oftentimes associated with college students,” Reddic said.

The first Green’s store to open in Columbia was the 10,000-square-foot Assembly Street Green’s in 1984 right next to the University of South Carolina. At the time, Reddic said it was difficult to find enough products to fill the store, but now staffers are filling up a store almost twice as big.

Liquor sales are their highest earning sector, making up 30% of Green’s revenue, Reddic said. The volume of beer and wine sales depends on the store. The Assembly Street location sells mostly beers and seltzers, whereas the Landmark Square location will have an extensive wine collection and full-time wine consultants available to help shoppers.

Green’s Beverages is owned by Jerry Greenbaum, whose father opened the first store in Midtown Atlanta in 1937. The Landmark Square Green’s will be the seventh location.

This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 1:30 PM.