I doubt that Sesame Street has a liquor store. But only because there are many types of stores they don’t seem to have.
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps they also have pubs. Maybe they even sell Oscar the Grolsch, Big Blurred, The Countreau, Ernie Branca, Elmo-jitos and other favourites?
Bing/Dall-E 3 knows what a package store sells without having to be told:
Yes, I walked back my “law” comment after considering things like Budweiser “suitcases”.
I just do recall it being sort of a thing that the cashier would want six-packs bagged and bottles wrapped. Do we really want to bring down the neighborhood? So just customary and not a law.
I don’t get the one with The Count. Okay, in some way there’s a mispelling. Bert looks like he’s got a Hyneken.
ABC was always the store I’d see Virginia and south. Last place I was carded - at 33 
There are no OTB shops left in NYC. This would suggest no OTB locations around Sesame Street. Oscar would place his bets online like regular monsters. (He stopped using a bookie long ago after he got his legs horribly broken. This is why we don’t see him from the waist down.)
My bad, I forgot online betting killed OTB. I think it’s a Panera now.
AI image generators have difficulty with spelling in general. They don’t know words, per se, just shapes and combinations of them. If it weren’t for the fact that images containing words often have captions that contain the same words, they wouldn’t have any knowledge of words at all.
Ahh thanks - it was late and I missed the AI-gen bit. Had Fred Rogers been halfway through a bottle of Jack Daniels I’d have suspected something amiss.
OT: Yet have Bert & Ernie ever been depicted below the waist (i.e. with legs)? I know several of the Muppets (including Kermit and Miss Piggie) rode bicycles through Central Park (?) in one of the early films (So I’ll guess Muppets Take Manhattan) yet once I got older I knew right below off-screen Henson was holding Ernie and Oz holding Bert.
ETA: (if I can make it) a belated happy 80th to Frank Oz! May 25th.
“Packy” (packie?). Massachusetts also had “liquor stores”.
In CT, beer and wine could be sold in supermarkets (but only until 8PM, when I was a kid; thereafter, a “window shade” would be drawn down to cover those items to make clear that their sale was not allowed). Liquor/spirits were sold in packy’s (packaged liquors).
A quick drive to massachusetts would get around the early cutoff times.
[Massachusetts was where I first learned the difference between a milk shake and a frappe. You also don’t hear the term “rotary” (traffic circle) used much outside of New England. And, even fewer drivers who know how to navigate them! 
]
Here they are called roundabouts, and are just becoming common. New enough that people are still bothered/confused by them.
One (!) was recently added, here (I can’t recall any others in existence).
It is relatively small in diameter – maybe 50 ft across?
If you drive past it, the first thing you notice is all of the tire marks that go DIRECTLY ACROSS it!
“Really? Do you not see the path the pavement/asphalt takes AROUND it???!”
I’d heard the term before and knew what it referred to, but it’s never used here in Canada to mean either a liquor store or, AFAIK, anything else. I always considered it uniquely American but didn’t know how regional it was. To me it conveys an air of sleaze, like a low-life bar but instead of serving drinks to consume on the premises they sell entire bottles and put them in a package for you to take home, and hence the name. I always have the sense that “package store” is the sort of place where the sleazy proprietor always keep a loaded handgun just under the counter.
Ironically, though, I’m old enough to remember when liquor stores here in Ontario were considered Dens of Sin and Depravity. They were dreary places where no liquor could be seen; instead, they had rows of sign boards listing the merchandise, and you wrote down what you wanted on a little form and handed it to some wizened old clerk who would shuffle off to the back room and return with your sinful product, which he would wordlessly put in a plain paper bag. You would then leave the store, and the general aura was that you should hope that no one would see you.
Today, thankfully, while the liquor stores are still government-run, they’re bright and cheery, rife with attractively placed liquors, bright advertising and glossy catalogs, and an elegant section for vintage wines. A touch of the old sanctimony still exists, though, in rigorous carding for anyone who looks under 25, and refusal to serve anyone who emits even a whiff of alcohol.
Never heard the term before this thread.
Years ago I was visiting friends in Massachusetts and they said we needed to stop by the “packy store”. I was shocked because to my UK accustomed ears this sounded like “Paki store”. Here many small corner shops and off-licences are run by people from Southeast Asia and “paki” is a derogatory name for Pakistanis.
They are typically small ma&pa type shops; often less than a few hundred square feet. By contrast, some of the “liquor stores” are the size of grocery stores (e.g., Martigneti’s in Boston).
They’re becoming increasingly common in the Atlanta metro area.
I’ve heard the term “off-licence” in Canada, though (e.g. a small-town hotel that also acts as a liquor store).
They facilitate traffic flow without requiring the introduction of a signal/forced stop. They can be sized to allow traffic to proceed at whatever speed the civil engineer thinks appropriate.
These are typically executed at 65MPH.