Here is NC it is apparently illegal to sell alcohol before noon on Sunday. Not something I’d usually be real cognizant of. However, a few weeks ago I skipped church and decided to get my grocery shopping out of the way early. At 11:58 AM or so, the refused to ring up my 4 pack of single serving rioja. So no chicken rioja for us that night. The cash register automatically flagged it for the young Indian (from India) woman at the cash register. I was pretty sure the whole hassle wasn’t her idea, so I didn’t get all irate, but I didn’t feel like waiting 2 minutes and going through the line again.
The same “no alcohol before noon on Sunday” is in effect here, as well. From what I understand, it’s a pretty common law in a lot of places in the US.
BTW, in my post, I meant just west of Boston. Blame the people I live with for always talking to me while I’m typing.
Thanks, Laughing Lagomorph for the info. I don’t keep up to date on the liquor laws as of late, as I will be living in a different state by the time can actaully buy alcohol.
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Yeah, the Friday’s sucks. Unfortunately, there’s a dish (that escapes me at the moment) my wife really, really likes on the Friday’s menu. And she’s not a big fan of TexMex, so OtB is a tough sell.
As Lagomorph posted, MA recently repealed the statewide ban on Sunday liquor sales, though individual towns can still impose bans if they want. The law from the early 90s to 2004 was that only liquor stores in towns within 15 miles of the New Hampshire border could sell on Sunday. This was due to the large number of people driving up to NH to buy booze on Sunday, costing MA all those lovely tax revenues. They didn’t want to repeal the law across the whole state for some stupid reason, so they just made it that you still had to take a drive, but you didn’t have to go all the way to NH.
Yep, it is, and a store can lose their license to sell alcohol if they do so before exact straight-up noon on Sunday. This law was also on the books in Virginia when I lived there (and probably still is - Virginia has some of the most bizarre alcohol laws) and Ohio had it when I lived there as well. Don’t order a glass of wine with your restaurant lunch on Sunday either until it’s 12:01.
I beleive it’s that way in Illinois too. When I lived there, my wife (now ex) worked at a convenience store and the manager told her not to come in until noon on Sundays. You see the only reason they hired her was they needed someone over 21 to sell alcohol on Sundays.
Here in Anderson, Indiana, the City Council passed an ordinance adding cats to the dogs-on-a-leash rule. I wrote a sarcastic letter to the local paper “praising” Councilman Bob Scharnowske for protecting our town from roving packs of ferocious pussycats. I finished with, “Let no mouse live in fear!”
That’s funny 
Fire regulations are another stupid area. When my family ran a country pub in the late 80s, we had a back room behind the bar with a few tables and a jukebox in it. It used to get a little crowded in there sometimes, but that was okay as far as the fire regulations went.
See, we could have the jukebox with a hundred or more people dancing to it on Saturday night and that was deemed okay, but as soon as we hired a bloke with a guitar to play to five people on a Tuesday afternoon, it suddenly became a fire hazard because that was “live entertainment” and meant we’d have needed to spend thousands getting new wider exit doors installed.
This one’s not a law, but a stupid club rule. At my local club, the slot machine area and the bars are off limits to persons under eighteen years of age. Fair enough. There is a lounge area upstairs where kids are allowed to go. It sells snacks and soft drinks, but adults are allowed to take their alcoholic beverages up there so that they can have a beer or two while they supervise their kids. This is fair enough too. The stupid thing is, children MUST be supervised at all times, so although you are allowed to have a beer up there, you are not allowed to go and GET ONE because the kids can’t go to the bar, and you can’t leave them alone. I bolted downstairs last time and hurriedly grabbed a beer, and by the time I got back, security were already asking my son where his parents were.
About the dancing thing; it’s not that it’s illegal to dance and drink, it’s that in bars you can’t have glass on the dance floor. The idea is to prevent broken glass and bloody people and such. Though, I think that they just repealed that law, IIRC. They also just repealed the law which made it illegal to have more than one drink in front of you at a time.
I just read in a magazine–I think it was Forbes or Money, that a casual game of low-stakes poker is illegal in about 10 states. That in itself didn’t actually surprise me, but the article said that people really do get busted for it! I’m having a hard time imaginging how the police become alerted to the situation.
Have we really gotten 53 posts into this thread without a mention of the Passion Party arrests in Texas?
Keep “The Man” off your dildoes and out of your lingerie, ladies!
No, that’s really a good law. 1. It protects the “pussycats”- they are not going to get run over or eaten by coyotes if you have them on a leash. 2. It protects other dudes cats, since there will be less disease spreading and fighting. 3. It protects the songbirds- cats kill a LOT of songbirds.
I wouldn’t call it North Jersey but you might be talking about Green Brook. Rt 22 goes right through the middle of it and there are quite a few fast food joints in town. I have seen the signs in the parking lot of the McD’s. I have also ignored those signs several times.
Yes, that’s the place they were talking about, and according to many callers, the cops actually do ticket folks for it.
(anything north of Trenton is “North Jersey” in my book :))
Actually, ** Odinoneeye**, it isn’t that way in all of Illinois - towns are all different. Where I live, I can buy a 30 pack at 8:30 in the morning on Sunday. The bar down the street from me opens at 6:00 AM on a Sunday - the towns, not the State of Illinois, make those rules up. For instance, I believe it’s Rolling Meadows which is right down the street from me where you can’t buy alcohol on Sunday until Noon.
Most liquor laws are pretty absurd.In Kansas (until recently) you couldn’t buy on Sundays. Then you couldn’t buy in a liquor store on Sundays, but you could at grocery stores.
Grocery stores aren’t allowed to sell hard liquor or beer with more than 3.2% alcohol. Liquor stores (who can now sell on Sundays) can’t sell beer with 3.2% alcohol but can sell beer with more.
There are two different kinds of most beers for sale in Kansas. Take, Bud Light, for example. The 5% kind is available for certain hours at liquor stores. The 3.2% kind is available for certain hours in grocery stores. Why? The reasoning used to be: less alcohol means people won’t get as drunk on Sundays. Now, 5% is available on Sundays, so why the restriction?
You can’t sell anything that isn’t liquor or beer or wine (like mixers) at a liquor store. You can’t sell ICE out of the same register as the beer. But, you can have a party shop that has ice in it and the same person can take your money, but you can’t put it in the register.
You can’t sell liquor in Oklahoma without putting it in a bag first. In Kansas, a six pack holder with fewer than six beers in it is considered an open container and can subject you to fines and arrest.
Also, people of the same sex aren’t allowed to marry each other. :eek:
Ok.
I was living in Des Plaines at the time.
The laws could have changed since then, it was a few years ago.
The town where I grew up had this law. It was basically a loitering law. Not sure how much it’s enforced though.
I don’t have any stupid laws to add to this thread, but reading through this I gotta wonder… Why exactly is it illegal to sell books on Sunday in some places? “No no no… You can’t buy a book! Go home and watch some TV!”
And on the Wal Mart that ropes off specific areas of the store… WHAT? I’d like to see this list of things that for some reason or another are not legal to be sold on Sundays… wait, no… scratch that… I’d like to know the reasons too.
And they ticket people for eating in their cars because it might cause littering? So if I get out of my car and eat outside I’ll be less likely to throw my trash on the ground?
I know some towns passed laws like “Can’t eat garlic before going to church” but I had heard that most were just passed by bored lawmakers as jokes and were never enforced, but this stuff is just plain stupid.