I don’t disagree if you want to stay out of the very bottom basement; or adhere to current legislation(I suspect that just redefining the supermarket deli counter guy’s job description to also include handling the safe and repeatable dilution of hundreds of liters of nearly pure alcohol for human consumption would make the penalties for underage whiskey disappear into the noise by comparison); my thinking was more along the lines of “what would you end up doing to satiate the people who start feeling at least some alcohol withdrawal symptoms if they stop drinking in absence of the usual supplies?”
As you note, the logistics are totally backwards if you want to still adhere to some semblance of how things are done; but more distributed; I’m thinking more along the lines of "when someone is available to drive it a tanker truck full of NGS shows up in the supermarket parking lot; the employees handle dilution and billing by weight, and flavoring if they have something soluble and likely to make the stuff go down a little smoother in stock. Customers bring their own containers, and pretend they are clean, while staff fill them and pretend to believe that.
I’ll confess to judgement perhaps skewed by an interest in dystopian fiction; but I had a supply chain for alcohol junkies with standards they had hoped not to test the flexibility of in mind; not so much one intended to keep marginally respectable booze on the shelves for the holidays.
