The short answer: about $400-million a year. The long answer: it’s complicated.

The Beer Store’s retail outlets themselves operate on a break-even basis, meaning they just pull in enough money to cover costs. This structure allows the Beer Store’s owners to describe the operation as a not-for-profit.

But that’s not the full story. It doesn’t take into account the profits of brewers. The Beer Store takes in about $2.5-billion in revenue annually after taxes, of which roughly 80 per cent goes to the owners.

To understand how lucrative The Beer Store is to its owners, you have to figure out how much more money they are getting from the current system than if they had to sell their beer in a free market, or through the government-owned LCBO.

There are two ways the owners benefit from The Beer Store.

The first is through lower retail, distribution and warehousing costs. In a free-market system, the big brewers would have to market and sell their beer to thousands of different retail outlets, and pay substantial costs shipping it. By consolidating all of these logistics into a single network of warehouses and stores, the brewers save a lot of money through economies of scale.

The Beer Store’s own numbers calculate retail and distribution costs in Ontario at $5.34 per 24-case of beer, compared to $9.06 in Quebec, which has a more open beer market. Calculate the overall costs for the big brewers in Ontario, compared to what those costs would be if they had the same unit costs as in Quebec, and the difference is $246-million. That’s $246-million the owners save.

The second benefit is from higher market share. Controlling your own retail chain allows you to do things that make sure you sell more of your product, and less of your competitors’. Mr. Clark, for instance, accused The Beer Store’s owners of prominently displaying their own brands in the stores, while craft beers made by non-owners are hard to find. So how much larger is that extra market share? One comparator is the LCBO. At the LCBO, the Beer Store owners’ brews make up about 74 per cent of beer sales. At the Beer Store, the number is 80 per cent. Six per cent of the owners’ annual revenue is $150-million.

Add the cost savings together with the extra market share and you get $396-million. That is how valuable The Beer Store is to its owners.