Compare this with the benchmark.
Earlier this year I called ABC with a question about my liquor license and spoke to three different agents. Each one gave me a different answer. All of them were wrong.
There's a ton of hearsay and rumor about how the US Government works, even among educated/sophisticated people who are dextrous with bureaucracy. The problem gets much worse as you go down the educational ladder, which is most of the US population.
The Perfect, please meet The Good. You are not enemies.
If you're really curious, I want to get a Type-86 tasting license for my store. The ABC site[1] says my kind of store (<5000sqft) is "generally" not qualified, which makes it sound like there are exceptions (spoiler: there are).
The first agent told me that the license is not an add-on, meaning I'd have to complete a very long and expensive process to obtain the license with the risk of getting denied. This was wrong. It's an add-on.
The second agent told me that I was not eligible because I have less than 5000sqft of space. Not true (see below).
The third told my wife that 75% of the items in our store need to be alcoholic beverages to qualify. Wrong again.
I finally asked my legal LLM, which pointed me to the statute, which says, "Type-86 ... can be issued to businesses which also hold off-sale retail licenses [that] earn at least 75 percent of their total gross sales from the sale of alcoholic beverages." Ultimately, it comes down to how ABC interprets and enforces this law, so I really expected to get some clarity from them rather than complete falsities.
[1]: https://www.abc.ca.gov/instructional-tasting-license-for-off...