Stupid top 10%. The drunk just keep getting drunker while the rest of us poor bastards just get along sober day after day.
#occupybourbonstreet
Do I drink 74 drinks per week? Probably. Do I drink four 750ml bottles a week? No. What are they counting as a drink, liquorwise - 1.5 oz? Because if so, I don’t know how they’re arriving at that number.
It doesn’t sound implausible to me at all. The 80/20 rule is one of the first things they teach you in business 101.
That’s the rule stating 80% of any given business will come from 20% of its customers.
Hate to break it to you, but 1.5 oz is about 44.4ml… so 74 drinks would be just under 3300ml, or just under four and a half 750ml bottles.
(Coming to you as a lightweight from that second 10%. I feel like this statistic besmirches my reputation as a skilled drinker.)
Emphasis mine.
I guess that everyone’s idea of “insane” differs, because i was going to ask you pretty much the same question.
Oh shit, I forgot how to math. 
Yeah, I’m maybe at about a little over three 750ml bottles weekly, but not more than four. I’m not an alcoholic, jeez.
I’m thinking there’s some problem with the granularity of the graph. They broke it up into deciles, which probably mislead the amounts.
I suspect that they’re rounding up, and there are a lot of people who may do something like the following who get lumped into the last decile:
[ul]
[li]4 beers on Sunday watching football[/li][li]1 beer on Monday[/li][li]2 beers on Tuesday[/li][li]1 beer on Wednesday[/li][li]2 beers on Thursday[/li][li]3 beers on Friday during happy hour.[/li][li]4 drinks (2 glasses of wine) while eating out with their spouse[/li][/ul]
That’s a total of 17 drinks in a week, well above the 15.28 category, but WAY lower than the 73.85 category. I’m betting that they’re lumped into that last decile while drinking less than a quarter the amount of alcohol.
You have over ten drinks a day, each with 1-1.5 ounces of alcohol in them?
Consider that a four-ounce glass of wine has only about .75 ounces of alcohol in it.
I said ten 1.5 oz *drinks *of liquor a day. Most of the liquor I consume is in the 80-90 proof zone.
That’s part of the slipperiness of this whole question - a “drink” can be anything from a shortie light beer to a mixed cocktail with 4 ounces of go juice in it.
Others have pointed out other flaws in the statistics. I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing - scare tactic, or grant bait, or PR stunt, or just plain stupidity of number-munging.
(Fifteen ounces of 86 proof is about 6-1/2 ounces of alcohol. So yes, I guess you are drinking around 60-70 “drinks,” as equated to 1 ounce of ethanol = 1 drink, which is the usual standard. Uh, that’s a lot, even from the perspective of someone who routinely drank about half that much until recently.)
Eh, the number isn’t really all that unrealistic. Even a mixed cocktail should contain at least one shot (1.5 oz) of liquor. One can easily drink ten of those. Hell, over Tuesday and Wednesday, I consumed one 750ml bottle of Jameson. Work that out over a week, and it’s 3.5 bottles. Getting over 4 isn’t hard.
I now know what my new year resolution is!
Getting over 4? (I’m funny)
THe “standard” drink is 1.5 oz of 80 proof spirits (40% abv), a 12 oz 5% abv beer, or a 5 oz glass of 12% abv wine. That’s 17.75 ml of straight ethanol.
I’m betting that’s what the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions uses as their standard drinks, and that’s where the data in the article comes from.
This was probably said somewhere above, but if it wasn’t – 24 million is not 10% of American drinkers, it is 10% of American people, probably roughly half of whom are not drinkers or drink no more than a drink or two a year and virtually never actually order and pay for their own drink, but just occasionally accept one socially, and have no alcohol in their house for their own consumption, but only to offer guests. I would not classify these people as “drinkers” for meaningful statistical purposes.
Remind me to open a dive bar next to MeanOldLady’s place.
Yes. And the alcohol industry has been aware of this for quite some time. They may pay lip service to responsible drinking, but that’s not how they make their bucks. (I don’t have a problem with that ethically. I do have a problem with industry lobbying, but that’s another topic.)
I’ll invest.
I don’t know about that. I hear she’s a mean drunk.
I’m in the late 20s/early 30s urban, young professional demographic and hang out with plenty of drinkers (myself included). 74 drinks/week on average seems crazy to me. I might hit that pace for short bursts every once in awhile, but I can’t imagine sustaining it for very long.
Well it’s actually 10% of American adults but my thread title could have been more accurate yes. US population is approaching 320 Million.