Crazy liquor laws in your neck of the woods

Connecticut has a wacky thing where beer (and not wine) can be sold in supermarkets, but not after 8 PM (or maybe it’s 9?). But it’s just on a normal shelf in the soda aisle, so they have to lock it up with a big heavy padlocked curtain during the times they can’t sell it.

I just go to the liquor store that’s next door.

IANASW (I am not a social worker), nor am I a long term resident of the region. I’ve been in the extreme north for about a year and a half in a term position. Long enough to get a feel for the region, but by no means am I an expert.

I think that restrictions on alcohol are in place because the potential for widespread alcoholism is strong. If despair and hopelessness are precursors of alcoholism, then there is reason to be concerned.

The local economy is very poor. Unemployment is quite high. Economic activity is almost entirely driven by government expenditures. Education levels are poor. Prospects and opportunities for many people are extremely limited.

The following studies discuss social, psychological and alcohol problems among residents of Canada’s far north. It paints a pretty bleak picture and shows why there are dry communities and restrictions on others. I don’t think that there’s any other way. Unfortunately, I don’t see things changing for the better any time soon.

That is not to say that there is not a vibrant, fascinating culture alive and well in Canada’s north. The people and culture of the north are fascinating. The pride, history, resilience, art and humour that abounds here is unlike anywhere else. My term here is coming to a close next month and I’ll return to work in the south, but my time in the north has been extremely rewarding personally. I’ve made many friends and had many experiences that I will fondly remember.

From Canadian Psychiatric Association

From National Aboriginal Health Association

Here in Memphis (the largest city in Tennessee, as I recall), no one can sell wine or liquor on Sunday. Restaurants and bars can serve it on the Sabbath, but it can’t be sold to take home.

Even during the week, wine and liquor can be sold only in specially licensed “liquor stores,” and these stores can sell nothing else. They can’t sell beer, or soft drinks, or snacks, or cigarettes, or anything; only they can sell wine and liquor, and they can only sell wine and liquor.

Also, there are quite a few bars here that serve only beer; apparently, a liquor license is far more demanding and expensive than a beer license, so lots of bars only sell beer. Most of them don’t mind if you bring in a bottle of something, and they’re happy to sell you a “set-up” consisting of a cup of ice and a Coke or similar mixer.

It’s Dry County. No package, bars, or restaurants with beer, liquor, or wine sells. I think that there might be private club sort of arrangement at the American Legion, but I don’t know. I’m in the West Texas / Texas South Plains area. 30 miles from a liquor store. I’m sure that there are a few bootleggers in town though. I just don’t know where at.

Thanks qwest sounds like many Inuit people are living a pretty grim life.

There is one city in Wisconsin I ran accross on vacation that sold no alcohol. It only makes since that a person not considered an adult by our courts, can not sell alcohol, or it would be hard to charge them for selling to minors. Before scanners the consumer had to punch it into a regesters in some places. Most place didn’t sell it if an adult employee wasn’t available. I really think the law should require an adult employee rings it in and does the liquir transaction, or they don’t sell it. The state store thing you others have won’t fly in this state, and is bogus crap. I thing the age for the purchase needs to be 18 and not what Reagan forced all the states to set it at 21. legal for war, legal for booze I say. He withheld all federal highway funds to get his way.

I thought Texas has this more screwed up than anywhere else, but reading some of these posts has changed my mind.

Here’s how this works in Texas:

The issue of wet/dry can be decided at the voting precinct level. In the past, that usually (not always, e.g. Cuney, TX) meant at the county level in rural areas. One side affect of this was the “highways of death” on the mjor routes from the dry to the wet counties.

In the cities, the result was a patchwork. You can have, in the same city, the following combinations:

1. Totally dry precinct,
2. Beer, but not liquor or wine,
3. Beer and wine, but not liquor,
4. Beer, wine, and liquor.

This leads to some weird geographical situations.

Statewide, liquor sales must stop at 9:00 PM but beer and wine can be sold until midnight. This means, that in totally wet areas, the stand-alone liquor stores must be partioned into two stores where the liquor side of the store can be closed at 9:00.

In dry areas, some restaurants declare themselves private clubs and sell memberships for $1.

The times, they are a changin, though. At least in the cities. The big retailers are tired of missing out on the sales, especially of wine. The have been some cases where they’ve refused to build in certain municipalities or have moved (e.g. North Richland Hills) because they couldn’t sell wine. In others, they have petitioned to get on the ballot and got ordinances changed (Bedford, Wautaga). The cities are finding out that the extra sales tax revenue is a good thing.

There is currently a case in Dallas where someone is petitioning to get the issue on the ballot in a Justice of the Peace district, which will override/conflict with some of the city and county ordinances. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Dallas is a good example of the patchwork I mentioned before. All of the liquor stores (and the strip joints) are concentrated in a few neighborhoods.

I’ve explained to outsiders that this patchwork concept serves a larger purpose and consequently, it will be hard to change. The patchwork allows the good, God-fearing folks to go to church on Sunday morning and say with a straight face, “We don’t allow that evil liquor or lacivious dancing anywhere near our homes and schools.” But, it’s still within driving distance when Friday night rolls around.

Prices for hard liquor here are no different than they were in Kansas. There’s also a bigger selection.

I can’t imagine anything in California being cheaper than here.

I was raised in the home of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and there were no package goods stores in my hometown until I was in college. There were a handful of restaurants that had licenses to serve beer and wine, but could only do so if you ordered a full meal (appetizers weren’t good enough). Of course, the temperance was tempered by the ability to drive a couple of miles to Chicago or Wilmette and buy booze pretty much at will.

The funniest was when I was in grad school in Bloomington, Indiana, though. No alcohol sales on Sunday or Election Day. Once I even got carded (I was 27) trying to buy a 6-pack of IBC root beer. I guess the brown glass bottles confused the cashier.

Here in Kentucky we have a hodge-podge. we have completely dry counties, wet counties, and “moist” counties… Nowhere in the state, to my knowledge, can you buy anything retail on a Sunday. (I’m not sure about Louisville…) You can only buy hard liquor in liquor stores, althought the good news is that we don’t have “state stores”. You can buy beer at groceries and gas stations, but not wine (of course, assuming you’re in a wet county). In Danville, you can get a drink at a restaurant if it’s large enough, but you can’t buy anything retail there or anywhere else in that county. Sadly, that represents progress - the town was completely dry until a few years ago. Some of the other “moist” counties have alcohol sales in one town (or even one precinct), while the rest of the county is dry. In Lebanon, which was (and maybe still is?) one of the most corrupt towns in the state, powerful interests used to own some/most of the liquor stores and the (regionally notorious) clubs, and all you needed to buy anything there was the ability to draw a breath. I bought anything I wanted down there, any time I wanted, when I was 16 (the legal drinking age was and is 21). I don’t know if this is still true.

As a liberal academic town, Bloomington is considered by many Hoosiers to be The Second Gomorrah… as such, it seems to get a disproportionate amount of attention from state enforcement types. As a result, it was much easier for me to buy beer when I was in high school (see previous post) than when I was an undergrad at IU. A shame, too, because I could have seen Mellenkamp back then when he was still playing the local bars…

That’s interesting. I live on the Eastern Shore, and we can buy beer and wine at our local gas station and grocery stores. It must be a county-by-county thing in this state.

Liquor laws? Is that like the government saying your drive through Daquiri window has to be a certain distance from the street?

Washington, has come a long way since I turned 21. Then, we had “Blue” laws. Women couldn’t sit at the bar, patrons couldn’t carry their own drinks from table to table. To buy alcohol of any kind, one had to have a special, liquor ID card. (I still have mine) A driver’s license wouldn’t do.
All that is in the past. Now, even though we pay a premium, there are State Liquor stores open on Sundays. Not all of them, of course, I think there are three in the Greater Seattle area. :rolleyes:

A couple of other doozies: the interior of a tavern had to be visible from the street, but the interior of a cocktail lounge (which still has to be part of a restaurant, but I believe they’ve relaxed the rule which stipulated that the establishment had to derive over 60% of its revenue from food sales) could not be visible. Also, the entrance to the cocktail lounge had to be a certain minimum distance from the street entrance.

Whether by fate or divine intervention, most of the rules were tossed out by public vote the year I turned 21 — fortunate, because my birthday was on a Sunday and that was the first year since Prohibition that alcohol sales were legal on the Sabbath.

(I’m quite certain that the “no women at the bar” rule applied to one class of establishment but not the other. Based on a “Booths for Ladies” sign I distinctly remember seeing on a tavern window, I believe that it applied to taverns — but I could be wrong.)

So, does that mean that people really don’t drink?

Or is it like pot in the US, where lots of people do it, quietly buying from illegal distributors?

Nope, My aunt owned both a tavern and a cocktail lounge in the 60s, before the “No women at the bar” rule faded. She used to complain about not being able to sit at her own bar in either place.

In my next town over, you cannot buy alchohol before noon on Sunday.

I never understood that. I could hit the grocery store at 10:30a, finish my shopping at 11:45a, but I can’t buy that bottle of wine along with the milk and lunch meat and Little Debbies. But if I spent 15 more minutes lingering over the bakery bread or the deli cheeses, I can whip through the cashier line with that bottle of wine at 12:01 no problem.

And unfortunately perhaps as a result of it, there are kids who huff solvents and drink copier toner instead. And when they grow up and move to YK or Iqaluit for high school, many of them develop drinking problems or full-blown alcoholism because they don’t know how to handle it. :frowning:

I have in the past had clients fly in to Yellowknife from the communities and get liquored up on the night they get in; then attempt to take care of their business in town the next day - often while still intoxicated from partying all night. As I worked in insurance and these clients needed to sign - i.e., enter legal contracts - I had to turn away people on occasion. That is certainly one thing I do not miss about living in the North.

I want to touch upon cruel butterfly’s very in depth description of the liquor laws of NM. The “restaurant license” s/he mentions is actually a fairly new one, only enacted about 4-5 years ago. Why do I mention this? Because there was a special referendum to vote on it. And I voted yes, though I was also under 21 at the time. Just thought it was a bit funny.

Funny thing is, the new licenses led to a boom of chain restaurants coming to my town (i.e. Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.) They wouldn’t franchise to an area where they couldn’t get some type of liquor license. And they weren’t going to spend $300,000+ to buy a license, if they could even find an establishment wiling to sell theirs.