No drive through liquor in Ann Arbor any more. That ended in 2003 or 2005, depending on which website I’m reading (Let’s just call it “about ten years ago”).
So you can cast a sober vote for a candidate who will drive you to drink for the next four years. 
Regarding Pennsylvania, when I was a kid my dad would drive to the case store, which was like a garage with doors on each end. You’d drive in the garage, which was like a warehouse with stacks of cases. You get out, pay for your beer, then the clerks would get your cases. You opened your trunk, they put the beer in, then you drive forward out the other end.
Hmm. I guess that’s why drive-through alcohol purchase is specifically not legal in Indiana. I didn’t know other states had it. Indiana is the only state where I’ve owned a car. The drive-through of every pharmacy I’ve ever been to has a sign saying that per state law, they will not sell liquor through the window. Generally, they don’t sell anything but prescriptions through the window, so the sign is redundant, but I guess they have to display it.
Well, in Pennsylvania, drive thru is only permitted for case stores. You can’t buy alcohol at the pharmacy. You can’t buy six packs except from an establishment that serves beer on the premises, such as a bar or restaurant, and those places don’t do drive thru business. And it’s not practical to hand whole cases through a window. They didn’t sell beer in packaged 24 or 30 packs, they were open flat cardboard cases, so that’s why you drive into the building and they put it in your car. Although I suppose if you want to walk in you can, as long as you’re buying a case.
Liquor and wine can only be sold in stores owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania so, again, no drive thru there.
One would think that Wisconsin, *“The Drunkest Place On Earth”*TM wouldn’t have screwy booze laws, but it has a couple. For the last 4 years of my full time career I was a compliance investigator and had to actively enforce this nonsense.
First of all, state law allows wine and hard liquor only to be sold until 9pm, but beer until midnight. That makes no sense. One can get drunker on 12% Four Loco than they can on 8% table wine.
State law has no per-emption clause. So local municipalities can set their own times for sales. Milwaukee County, for example, only allows beer sales until 9pm for the entire county. This means if I get out of work at 11pm and want some beer I either have to sit in a bar or drive to Waukesha county. These types of laws are always pushed under the pretext of combating drunk driving but that’s a lie. They’re favorable to the tavern league who wants you sitting in a bar drinking, not at home. Then after drinking in a bar one has to drive home. So much for the combating drunk driving argument.
Wisconsin had an 18 drinking age which was fine. They should tell the feds to stuff 21 because all that does is encourage binge drinking. There is a psychological barrier effect to having to pay for every drink in a bar as opposed to all you can drink at a keg party.
.08 is a ridiculous DWI standard. Most people test well at that level and many don’t even realize they’re over the limit. Every DWI arrest I’ve ever made has been at least .12 and usually higher than .15. .08 for most adults is not serious impairment.
Wisconsin is the only state in the union where ones first drunk driving conviction is a traffic ticket, not a crime, not even a misdemeanor. If there was no accident or injury I don’t have a problem with this but I know a lot of people do. After 5 years that offense disappears from record so one could get a DWI/OWI every 5 years and every time it would be your first. That’s weird.
“Non-alcoholic brew” is categorized the same as soda and water and anyone of any age can purchase/possess/consume it. But You’d be surprised at how many businesses and law enforcement officers are ignorant of that.
Open container laws are stupid. One can sit in a bar and drink 3 beers and legally drive home, but drink no beer in a bar but drink 1 while driving home and it’s a violation? Huh? And why should it matter if an adult passenger is drinking while a sober adult is driving?
State law allows a minor to consume alcohol if they’re with their adult parents or spouse. Contrary to popular myth that minor does not have to remain with the adult after consuming. This means if I detain an intoxicated 16 year old pedestrian and he says he was drinking with his parents and I call the parents and they say they let him drink while he was with them, I can’t do anything about it. There is no state public intoxication statute and most municipalities don’t have local ordinances for it either. Many of the “plain drunk” laws were struck down by the courts.
It is illegal by statute for retailers to give refunds or exchanges for alcoholic beverages. This is because it would be an unlicensed transaction on the part of the consumer. This is absolute horseshit. Anyone who has ever gotten a skunky 6 pack of beer should be allowed to get a refund or exchange.
Agreed. It is enacted for no purpose other than to say: “We will curtail your freedom for the sole purpose of making law enforcement easier.”
I’ve heard that those laws date back to a time when saloons doubled as polling places in many towns, but there’s a good chance that’s a myth.
I always wondered about that. Most of the people here are transplants so that’s the first I’ve heard of that. I’m a transplant from Frederick and no grocery stores sold beer or wine. Sadly Magruder’s is now gone, which sucks because they were only a couple of blocks away.
I do remember that in the 90s Allegheny county had laws prohibiting sales on Sundays, at least they did near Frostburg.
Maryland also allows dry towns, Damascus was one such town. Not sure even how that works now, I know that a couple of restaurants sell beer, but I don’t think any stores sell anything. Doesn’t keep the couple of stores right on the boundaries.
1a) Unopened cases & kegs only at a distributor. If a ‘case’ is actually two separately cardboarded 12-packs you can’t split that & get, say, a 12 of IPA & a 12 of lager from the same brewery because that’s considered splitting a case even though you are buying 24 bottles from the same brewery.
3a) Supermarkets that sell 6-packs must do so at separate cash registers. Run in to buy a bag of pretzels & 6-pack for the game; two separate purchases at two separate registers. :smack:
- Until relatively recently, brewpubs could only sell what they made there, no outside beer, wine, or liquor.
- PSP / LCB were known to sit in unmarked cars in the parking lots of the NJ liquor stores. If they saw PA plates getting a decent amount, they’d radio ahead to marked car sitting on the PA side of the bridge because you were a bootlegger
- This year, an almost 2500 bottle collection of wine worth over $125,000, much of it not legal to buy in PA only because the state doesn’t sell those specific brands/vintages was confiscated & may be destroyed. That’s right, if the state doesn’t sell the bottle of ____ that you want, there is no way for you to legally own it in PA. Even if it’s just a different year, size, or proof (& I’m not talking grain alcohol) of a company they otherwise deal with.
I can’t speak to what people are normally impaired at, but isn’t .08 pretty much the highest limit around? Some locations IIRC are more like .04 or around 2 drinks (at full strength, without giving them any time to get processed.)
I’d like to point out in in PA it is now possible to buy beer, cider, & wine coolers at a supermarket in PA. The supermarket has to designate part of as a restaurant and you can buy booze at those registers; they also have to allow on-site consumption with meals & the 2 6-pack limit applies. I few years ago the LCB experimented with letting wine be sold in supermarkets, but not buy the supermarkets themselves. The LCB installed large wine vending machines in select supermarkets. You had to swipe your driver’s licence & blow into a breathalyzer, the entire process being overseen by a remote LCB clerk via videophone. Needless to say they were widely unpopular. Everyone hated them, even the stores that agreed to have them installed.
Question about the storage part; So if I but 6 bottles for a party ands it falls through (let’s say huge snowstorm no one expected) am I breaking the law 48 hours later if I still have those bottles in my house?
[del]Forrest Park[/del] Really? Well I’ll be! 
I think the low DUI limits are to encourage groups to appoint a designated driver as a matter of course. A lot of bars have DD wristbands, and serve free soft drinks to DDs, but the bartender knows not to sell an alcoholic drink to a DD.
By the way, Indiana also has a law that you can’t walk out of a bar with your drink, and that means no matter what you are drinking. I once walked out of a bar with a plain Coke (in a plastic, throwaway cup), and had the doorman come running after me to confiscate it. I don’t drink at all now, because I get headaches (not hangovers-- headaches that start about 20 minutes into having more than about 3 ozs of wine, or a 1/2 a hard cider). But I used to drink a little in college-- I get drunk pretty easily, though, so I always stopped at one mixed drink, because I didn’t like beer, and I felt silly drinking wine in a bar. After one, I’d switch to Coke.
In Thailand, it’s illegal to buy alcohol from 2-5pm. That started about a decade ago. The idea is to keep it out of the hands of little schoolchildren, who are going home about that time. But the thing is it’s seven days a week, even on weekends and holidays! Plus the law exempts wholesalers buying in quantity, so you can go to the store and buy a couple of cases but not just a six-pack or single bottle during that time period.
(There’s always some low-key places willing to sell though. But the high-profile supermarkets and such pretty much have to follow the law.)
BAC has to do with body weight. A man of my size will not be .04 after only 2 drinks.
At one time most states had limits of .10 and a few had .15. It was the feds who mandated .08 which is an arbitrary number in my opinion.
Problem is, few “drunk drivers” are below .12. In my observation the impairment for most grown adults at .08 is miniscule. Real impairment doesn’t begin until .10.
This, of course, is my observation and opinion after 32+ years of law enforcement.
I don’t recall ever observing a vehicle being driven eratically where the driver was only .08. A .04 limit would be even more ridiculous. The majority of my DWI/OWI arrests involved people in excess of .15. In fact .22 is the number that pops up at most alcohol involved accidents. Don’t know what it is about that level.
Crazy liquor laws are the result of attempting to find a balance between two extremes that each had problems historically:
[ol]
[li]Few or no regulations. The result, a saloon on every second corner, massive drunkeness[/li][li]Prohibition. Didn’t eliminate alcohol, caused problems of its own.[/li][/ol]So the best anyone’s come up with are restrictions on how freely (short of banning) alcohol can be sold. Time and place restrictions, local government monopolies, licensing standards for bars and liquor-serving restaurants. In short, make alcohol just hard enough to get to discourage people passing out on the sidewalk, but not so hard as to drive drinking underground. It’s mostly worked, although cities still have problems with illegal “after hours” venues.
And I believe it’s not so anymore, but where I grew up in West Texas, you could only buy drinks in bars and restaurants. If you wanted beer, wine or liquor for your home, all the liquor stores were in the county outside the town limits. So you had all these people, many of them already sloshed, driving way out to go buy more. It was especially heavy traffic on weekend nights.
My gawd - is that bit of idiocy still on the books?
Prior to about 1970, there were no sales of any alcoholic beverage on Sunday.
The by-the-drink finally passed because somebody wanted to build a Convention Center in Naptown - and “Conventioneers” can get drunk on Sundays everywhere else (except Kansas - Naptown was SO FAR above the hicks in Kansas). After much debate, liquor on Sundays:
Only by-the-drink
Only in a place which does $X/year income - over which HALF must come from food - no booze for you, poor people.
I heard that unscrupulous politicians (another redundancy again!) would get “voters” to vote for their very bheshest buddissh - the one who just bought 5 rounds for the entire bar!
I was thinking southwest suburbs myself. Seems like wherever there’s a decent Polish population, you’ll find the high-grade Polish grain alcohol (Spirytus, with is 192 proof) and possibly Everclear. I’ve even seen the 192 proof sold once within the city, too, but they quickly changed to 151 the next week I was there (I don’t know if it was an honest mistake or if somebody ratted them out.) Looking at the Binny’s website, seems like pretty much all the suburban stores have the 192 proof stuff. All the city of Chicago stores list “Special Order.”