Any place selling booze has to have a licence and there’s different kinds of licences depending on whether they’re only selling take away or selling for consumption on site or only selling food and having a BYO licence.
Liquor stores (AKA Bottle shops) can sell all forms of booze, mixers, snacks that go with them etc. No big deal. No segregation of different types of booze.
licensed Supermarkets usually have a separate department for alcohol, it’s not just on the shelves next to the lemonade.
Other than specialty liquor stores or hotels, and licensed supermarkets no other places sell take away. If you buy booze at a restaurant, once it’s opened you can’t take it with you and you can’t buy booze at a convenience store.
There’s no fixed hours that I’m aware (depends on the licence) of but generally good luck trying to buy take away after midnight and before 9am.
Some local councils have designated suburbs as “dry” meaning that there are no premises licensed where you can purchase alcohol for on the spot consumption, but but even these places have take away bottle shops.
Most councils also put in place dry areas where you aren’t allowed to drink in the open. Like parks. In my home town in NSW if you want walk to the river and drink a beer while walking, you’re breaking the law.
It’s dumber than that; the way the laws are written, a municipal vote to be wet only applies to the boundaries of the city WHEN the vote was taken. Any subsequent additions to the city aren’t necessarily wet. And county-wide votes don’t necessarily apply within cities either.
So what you end up with is eminently fucked-up situations like Dallas had until the last year or so, where like in 1930 or so, there was a vote, and the city of Dallas was wet, but within a dry county. In the intervening 80 years or so, the city grew, and there was a county vote to go wet. What this meant was that until 2012 or so, there was a wet core of old Dallas, a big dry doughnut, and a wet county, because the dry doughnut wasn’t within the city when the original vote was taken, and wasn’t in the county when their vote was taken. It took another city referendum to make the whole thing wet, and believe it or not, it was contentious as hell, for reasons beyond me.
I’m in Damascus, and the only discernable difference I’ve seen is that the one cafe in town with evening entertainment now has beer on tap. There might be a pizza place that sells beer as well, I don’t know.
I voted to end the dry town status, as did enough other newcomers to overturn this Prohibition-era idiocy.
Yes, as others have pointed out, liquor and wine are only sold in State-owned shops and the clerks are State employees. And the State sets prices so they are the same in all shops for the same item.
Another oddity about PA is that anything that encourages consumption of alcohol is illegal. Bars can get away with Happy Hours, but giving away prizes for consuming 100 different beers (for instance) would be illegal.
Also in PA, a bartender may give one free drink to someone over the course of 24 hours. And beer may not be sold for less than the price the bar paid for it.
I remember circa 1984, stopping for a case of beer on the way home from work in the summer. The brand wasn’t twist offs, and the proprietor always asked me how many bottles he should pop open.
In Texas, there was a period when it was OK for the driver, too. I remember an offsite records management job, way out Beyond The Loop. At the end of a mind-crushing day, Ritchie would stop at a convenience store & we’d buy a couple of Miller Lite tallboys for the ride back to town…
In the town nearest where I grew up, population 600, has three bars (that exceeds by quite a lot the state average of 1877 people/bar). The two unincorporated villages near me (population: too low to count) each had one, though one is gone now. I think it was someone’s house, too.
I don’t know if it was the law, or just the store policy, but I got chased out of the liquor aisle at 1:30 am because it was after sales hours. I didn’t even have any in the cart - I was just “window shopping”. I couldn’t have done anything with it anyway, since they wouldn’t have sold it to me, so I don’t know what they were all upset about.
Must have been store policy because the state permits liquor sales right up to 2 am. (Although, of course it doesn’t require liquor to be sold until 2.)
I believe that next to Louisiana, Missouri has the most relaxed alcohol laws in the nation. There are no open carry laws and you find people waking around drinking before a ballgame or what-have-you. I’ve also been told by a LEO that there is no law prohibiting an open container in a vehicle as long as there is one less than total number of people in a car (to account for the driver), but never tried it myself. And we have drive- through liquor stores that we actually purchased a keg through once. [/cheers]
It’s illegal to walk through the aisle? The mere aura of spirituous liquors creates a field that permeates the aisle and can corrupt me when simply walking by? This was a supermarket, I should add.
I was going to say “Tell that to my local Fresh & Easy,” but you covered the catch. I buy beer there all the time. You just have to catch the eye of the one person working the front.
I too remember “roadies” in the good old days in Texas. Bombing down the back roads with a PBR between your legs and country music on the radio.
Yes, it is asinine. If it’s an open aisle anyone (and in Arizona, the liquor aisle is just another aisle among the other items and not in a separate part of the store) can walk through and not blocked off somehow, I don’t see how they can prevent you from walking down it. As you pointed out, they can just refuse to sell you booze after hours.
Edited to add: It’s not illegal. It’s just asinine policy on the part of the store.
In my experience as a graveyard shift manager at a grocery store, nine times out of ten someone is perusing the alcohol section after hours, it’s because they’re planning on pulling a cart push (i.e. toss a few cases in their cart and walk straight out the door with it), and it’s remarkably easy to get away with because few stores have security personnel working at that hour and non-LC employees aren’t allowed to interdict a shoplifter for liability reasons. Shooing people away from the aisle can be a discreet way of letting them know they’re being watched.
I guess one thing that amuses me about the two open container laws where I am in Montana is that we only got the vehicular open container law back in 2008 or thereabouts, but it’s a really small fine (I think it’s $40.) Most of the towns (with the notable exception of Butte) have their own open container ordinances for drinking outside with way higher fines (in my town I think it’s over $200.) So the moral is that if you want to drink outside of a bar or your house, do it in your car!
