Off premise here refers to any retail sale of packaged goods.
It’s your liquor stores, groceries, beer distributors and convenience stores. So what I’m talking about is sale for home consumption.
We do not generally apply these liabilities to stores selling packaged alcohol here. We certainly don’t put criminal liability on a gas station clerk who sold beer to some one who later drives drunk.
You’re going to have to elaborate there, cause that could mean a whole lot. And I am not aware of any broadly established difference between home consumption and consumption outside the home. Outside the home is a bigger factor in drunk driving, at home for domestic violence and suicide and so forth. And the various problems will carry different weights in different societies and even different locations or regions.
But there may also be competing correlations. Like the US would probably take the cake on suicides, but that is much more closely tied to our gun problem.
My family in Ireland often bring this up, that the real problem is “them” drinking at home. It doesn’t seem to mesh even with the stats from their own country. So that might be your cultural difference there. The assumption is that home consumption is the problem in Europe and some other places, where as the assumption is it’s bars here in the US.
The two aren’t all that separate when you get right down to it.
Because when we did it the other way it didn’t work for shit.
Limiting consumption by limiting access has been a century long failure here. There isn’t really a practical difference in alcoholism and other metrics between places with more restrictions and less. They’re much more closely tied to economic factors, and a lot of the more restricted places are also the poorer ones. In the Rust Belt and the South.
Meanwhile there were a host of negative economic impacts, mostly rolling out of how a restricted market fueled industry consolidation. The rush to do away with blue laws, and adopt less restricted licensing has gone hand in hand with the development of the “craft” alcohol industry which has been a huge economic boon.
It’s also isn’t quite as unrestricted as it might look. In most states you aren’t getting much more than beer and perhaps wine at that gas station. Where as in Europe your buying hard liquor at Tesco, retail package sales exist in other countries. It’s just often heavily tied to large companies. And it isn’t for nothing that Europe is the home of globally consolidated alcohol mega corps.
This has caused a number of movements to develop independent and craft production, and attendant moves to loosen things up. In order to break up regional monopolies or direct ownership of restaurants and capture of off premise sales by the biggest companies. Many other countries are looking at particularly successful models from individual US states as something to emulate.
Much of the loosening restrictions in the US. Which only really start in the 70’s with less restricted production and allowing home brewing and wine making, but doesn’t really kick off till the 90’s. Was about economic development, and fostering new and small businesses.
Counter to the doom saying along the way. Rates on most of your alcohol related problems are on the whole much lower in most of the country than the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
So for one it isn’t the job of service workers to supervise anyone. And much of what I’m on about is why it’s a bad idea to assume that, and why it doesn’t work.
For another the cost of a drink at a US bar isn’t down to liability insurance. That’s a big, and increasing bit of overhead but it isn’t solely linked to alcohol service. The major drivers of overhead are the cost of commercial real estate, labor and the impacts of the tipping system which have skewed the entire market towards disasterously low margins by off-putting a huge chunk of the labor costs.
Beyond that the cost of a drink at a bar or restaurant in other western countries is often not much lower, and sometimes much higher. Dependant on the local economy.
Based on what the family over in Ireland complains about. The cost of a beer or glass of wine is about the same these days, though it used to be cheaper in the US. But spirits and mixed drinks are apparently much more expensive over there at the moment.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of those other western nations have much higher rates of alcoholism, higher overall alcohol consumption, and bigger problems with shit like drunk driving than the US does. Despite all these differences, and expectations to the contrary.
If you read my comments you’ll notice that I’m referring to underaged drinkers, and those with a criminal record that already bars them from purchasing alcohol.
Expecting service workers to filter those people out without a tool to do it properly is a bit insane. In terms of those who tend to end up on probation/parole blocking them from drinking, there’s also a serious enforcement gap. For example here a lot of your habitual drunk drivers are more likely to get a ride home from a friend on the police force than they are to get arrested again.
Are you in the habit of showing up already drunk? Getting uncontrollably blotto or causing problems? Sitting on the other end of it I cut off and refused service to a lot of people. It was nightly occurrence at every bar I ever worked at. And I kicked out plenty for shit ranging from non payment, poor behavior and racism to outright violent behavior and sexual assault.
That’s the problem with anecdote. But this speaks to the overall issue with expecting service workers to be a primary step in enforcement. There are myriad pressures not to do so.
The primary one being the very customers you expect them to watchdog, are responsible for their income. Restaurant workers are not in a power position at all, none the less state authorities empowered to enforce our laws.
The whole idea behind liquor licenses is to enforce and collect taxes.
But at no point has that been even implicitly tied to enforcement. It’s always been about general revenue, and “paying for enforcement” would mean redirecting alcohol tax revenue into police departments. Some level of it goes into our state alcohol control agencies, which does cover some enforcement.
But while the push recently has been to lay criminal liability on restaurant workers. Seriously there was a law pushed here proposing the criminal charges applied to drug dealers be applied to bartenders. Those state liquor boards often have a massive amount of trouble, or lack interest in, doing basic shit like revoking the liquor licenses of businesses that routinely violate the law.
It often takes years to revoke the license of places openly serving people underaged. Even longer if the issue is a more generalized overconsumption shit show.
This isn’t due to lack of funding. But lack of will and apparatus. But rather than creating a better enforcement regime on that end. We suggest prison terms and murder charges for bartenders, and fine people living near the poverty line thousands.
And ultimately there is no law against getting drunk, bars on serving the intoxicated are about tamping down drunk driving. There are far better paths to doing that (like access to public transit and denser urban planning). The biggest single steps in reducing drunk driving have been banning it in the first place, followed by raising the drinking age. That second one has caused it’s own sort of fallout, as it’s linked to an increase in binge drinking among younger Americans.
Which has been the state of things practically forever. Hell most of the US’s budget was paid for with liquor taxes for decades after independence.
Regardless of where that tax revenue comes from we spend precious little on things that might have genuine impact.
Like addiction treatment, rather than prison terms. Infrastructure and public transit. And a proper social safety net.
Shifting alcohol tax and licensing revenue to “enforcement” wouldn’t change that. And wouldn’t empower service staff to do anything more about shit that happens outside their grounds.
