A New Jersey town just ended one of the longest-running alcohol bans in the country, and the decision has less to do with drinking and more to do with how small towns compete for restaurant dollars.
Collingswood, a borough of roughly 14,000 people outside Camden, voted to repeal a dry law that dated back to 1886. For nearly a century and a half, restaurants in town could not serve beer, wine, or liquor, which meant diners who wanted a cocktail with their meal had to go elsewhere. The vote clears the way for the borough to begin issuing retail liquor licenses for the first time in its history.
This is not an isolated quirk. New Jersey has one of the highest concentrations of dry and partially dry towns in the country, a legacy of temperance-era local option laws that let municipalities opt out of alcohol sales decades before national Prohibition even began. Many of these towns have spent the last 20 years slowly reversing course as town councils and business groups argue that dry status puts local restaurants at a competitive disadvantage against neighboring towns that allow alcohol service.
The mechanics matter here. New Jersey caps the number of liquor licenses a municipality can issue based on population, and because many towns never issued licenses to begin with, existing ones in nearby wet towns have become scarce and expensive, often trading for six figures or more on the private resale market. When a dry town like Collingswood flips to wet, it typically starts from a very small allotment of new licenses, which means the first restaurants or bar owners to secure one are positioned with real leverage before the market catches up.
For comparison, towns like Haddonfield and Moorestown, both nearby in South Jersey, have gone through similar transitions in the past decade, and in both cases the shift drew in new restaurant investment that had previously bypassed the towns entirely.
The pattern here is consistent with what has played out in other formerly dry municipalities across the state and the country: a local vote lifts the ban, the town sets up a licensing or application process, and a wave of restaurant and bar openings follows within a year or two as operators who were waiting on the sidelines move in. The change rarely happens overnight because licenses are limited, application processes take months, and towns often prioritize applicants who commit to sit-down dining over bars.
For small business owners, particularly those running or considering a restaurant, café, or event space in a newly wet town, the immediate opportunity is securing one of the first licenses issued. Early applicants typically face less competition and can negotiate better lease terms with landlords eager to fill storefronts with alcohol-serving tenants, which tend to drive more foot traffic and higher average checks than BYOB establishments.
The trade-off is cost and uncertainty. License fees, insurance requirements, and compliance obligations add real overhead, and towns new to alcohol licensing sometimes take time to build out clear rules, which can mean delays for business owners trying to plan a launch around an opening date.
Owners of existing BYOB restaurants in these towns also face a decision: invest in a license to compete directly, or lean into the BYOB model as a point of differentiation now that it's no longer the only option in town.
Watch for how many liquor licenses Collingswood actually allocates in its first licensing round, what the application and fee structure looks like, and whether existing BYOB restaurants in town apply for licenses or hold their current model. Also worth tracking: whether neighboring dry towns in South Jersey face similar ballot measures in the next election cycle, since these votes tend to cluster once one town in a region moves first.
The bottom line: a dry law ending after 138 years is a slow-moving local business story, not an overnight one. The real action for owners is in the license application process over the next several months, not the vote itself.