I have actually purchased alcohol from one of those old-fashioned, fill-out-a-form liquor stores. It wasn’t that long ago (10 years?) when the Beer Stores and LCBOs were not allowed to be open on Sundays. And it wasn’t that long ago (30 years?) when you couldn’t buy an alcoholic beverage in a restaurant on a Sunday unless it was served with a meal.
Even today you cannot serve alcohol in an establishment unless you also offer food. The customer doesn’t need to purchase food, but you must have it available.
Having lived in California my whole life, where you can buy everything from beer to hard liquor in just about any grocery store or convenience store, I always find stories like this strange.
The idea of having to go to a state-owned liquor store just to buy Maker’s Mark sounds like some kind of dystopian nightmare future to me.
I don’t mind that so much. What I hate is that the province of Ontario has decreed that no bottle of beer shall cost less than $1.06 and 2/3 cents. Bullshit!
I don’t think that’s an off-sale, though; just a multi-purpose facility.
Liquor stores were privatized in Alberta shortly after I reached drinking age. The provincial liquor stores used to close early, and stay closed on holidays. I remember people going to the liquor store early in the week before a long weekend so you wouldnt have to deal with lineups as much and could get what you wanted - on Friday (Saturday?) before closing things were pretty well cleaned out.
First there was Cold Beer Stores and Wine Merchants and a couple years later full liquor stores started to open. There was a huge number of crappy hole in the wall stores with poor selection selling Canadian, Labatts Blue and other swill. It was a while before bigger stores with decent selection started to appear. Once they did we started seeing lots of variety, and you could general get a cold pack of beer when you wanted one. The provincial stores had no beer fridges.
There were also stricter operation regulations for bars; open for lunch, close, open again for dinner and close again at 12 or maybe even 11. Slightly easier regulations for restaurants. There used to be after hours clubs that were open late and kept a low profile. I seem to recall Sunday openings being a big deal also. Allowing stores in general to remain open on Sundays was something that only happened in the early 80’s. Alberta was a prohibition province in the thirties. Crazy puritans. Good riddance.
Aw man, I remember going to Edmonton a few years ago and being like ‘oh hey, there’s a [Real Canadian] Superstore over there’ and then slowly realizing that it was a liquor store that looked exactly like a Superstore. It certainly threw me for a loop!
I agree with this! I’m only able to compare Ontario to Québec, due to not having purchased alcohol in any other province or experienced the culture there, but it always surprised me at how "Grandma Grundy’ Ontario was, compared to Québec (which also has several of these elements, I should add!)
The different drinking ages (18 in QC, 19 in ON) combined with a social attitude that alcohol is a bad thing made my first week at university in ON kind of odd. I was 19, and going out to bars during frosh week was like being thrown back in time to when I was 15! The binge drinking and the attitude of “lol my parents would kill me if they knew what I was doing” was off-putting, since I’d been allowed to try alcoholic drinks since I was young, had drunk beer and wine regularly since I was 15, knew my limits, etc. I had Ontarian friends who had never had a glass of wine, and for whom having wine with dinner was a completely foreign concept since their families never did. I can’t pinpoint all of the differences, but in general, the “alcohol is bad” vibe was still quite strong in Ontario as recently as a decade ago.
I like to joke that the social difference between the two provinces can be found in the names of the government stores: Ontario Liquor Control Board vs Société d’alcool du Québec.
That said, I need to head over to Carleton Place soon to visit a friend and stock up on wine. Their prices are better and the SAQ doesn’t carry much of the Niagara stuff. Every time we visit my friend, my husband and I leave the LCBO with about $200-250 worth of wine. The staff there remember us and have even asked my friend when we’ll visit again!
Ontario’s age used to be 18, but Ontario also had a Grade 13 for high school (IOW, five years of high school, from Grade 9 at age 14 to Grade 13 at age 18)–so what was happening was, older high schoolers were legally allowed to drink. I was one of those; the age was 18 when I was in Grade 13, and I well recall heading off for a legal beer or two at the corner pub after a tough day of high school. The age was raised to 19 mainly because of the desire to get the legal age out of high school range. Of course, Ontario no longer has a Grade 13, and most people finish high school at 17, but I doubt that Ontario will be lowering its age to 18 as a result. Grandma Grundy’s “alcohol is bad” attitude still persists in some ways.
13 million… but that’s a huge exclusive market, when you think about it. Just about anywhere else, the market is split into dozens of competing sellers.
I guess it depends how many you’re bringing in at a time. With a whole vanful, I can see how sorting them would seem like a chore. Maybe we just had a particularly cranky beer store guy, dunno…
I do recall one guy who started bringing in empties, and went back out, and brought back more, and so on. We asked him how many he had–turned out he had a pickup truck full of empties. (Must have been a helluva party!) Anyway, we had him drive around to our loading door, and we took care of things that way. We still had a lot of sorting to do though, as his load was all mixed up.
Also, they do have to give the empties a cursory once-over to make sure you’re not sneaking any out-of-province bottles in there. The Beer Store does not give you deposit on U.S. beer bottles, for instance.
The house where I used to live in Canada was renowned for its parties, the returnables therefrom contributed significantly to the household budget at times.
Maybe we just had a particularly cranky beer store guy, dunno…