I live in New York State and recently our governor changed the liquor purchase time from 8a-8p to 10a-10p. You can buy beer from convenience stores at 8am-3am on Sundays like every other day but liquor is different. My question is why? Why is there a cutoff time?
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Because of tavern leagues lobbying for it, so that you have to go to the bar instead of drinking at home
I grew up in Illinois and was so surprised when I moved to NY! In IL I think you can buy liquor until midnight (or maybe 3 am, can’t recall) and they have it in the grocery stores with the wine and beer. It was odd moving here and realizing the liquor stores are separate and close early. Better for my sobriety though 🤪
In Québec, and the rest of Canada I think, it’s from 7am to 11pm that purchasing any type of alcohol is legal (beer, wine or liquor).
It has kind of a double function;
• It allows bars to still be popular since they can sell you alcohol up to 3am, but you have to consume it in the bar or establishment.
• It’s also a remnant of old religious laws combined with morality concerns.
Ontario has it worse, they have to go to a LCBO because not every convenience store / grocery store can sell alcohol.
P.S.: Most of Canada has the age of majority set to 18 y.o., I think it’s 19 in BC. Here in Montreal, only 40 minutes away from the US Border, we get a lot of US teens coming here for their first drink.
FYI, our beer is a little bit stronger than what you have down in the USA. Be careful!
People who care a lot about Jesus, somehow manage to think that Jesus would be very cross if we sold alcohol at some particular times.
As a Christian myself, I am quite familiar with what kind of person Jesus was, and I cannot picture him even having an opinion on the matter. But somehow, these people do, and they write laws to that effect.
Just add it to the long list of irrational things that people do in the name of Jesus, that Jesus would certainly not care either way.
There’s another list for the stuff people do in the name of Jesus, that Jesus would be actively disgusted with.
There is a persistent belief that distilled beverages (which are typically 30-55% alcohol by volume) are somehow more dangerous than beer (anywhere from 3-10% ABV) and wine (usually 6-18% ABV), even though they generally contain about the same amount of alcohol per serving. This leads to the idea that “hard liquor” is a greater risk to public safety and must be regulated more strictly, even though there is little scientific evidence to support this.
In theory, you can reach a dangerously high blood alcohol content faster with distilled spirits than with beer or wine. But anyone who has seen college students shotgunning beers knows that theory and practice don’t always match. Worse, this belief leads people to think that they are not intoxicated and are capable of driving safely because they’ve “only had a few beers.”
I live in Missouri. For many years they did not allow Sunday beer sales. Then they decided that stores could sell “Sunday” beer, which was 3.2% alcohol, as opposed to the liquor store beer, which was 5.0%. They had to have a separate cooler and separate cash register for Sunday beer. At this point they just shut alcohol sales down from 1:30am until 6am. This is kind of a holdover from the “Blue Laws” which limited sales of anything that was considered “work” on Sunday.
It’s not just the US we have it in my country as well.
Like there is a sign on the restaurant door that says liquor can only be sold from 11:30am to 10:30pm or something along those lines.
Shops as well, in some city’s, alcohol cannot be sold on Sundays at a Supermarket so they have gates the close off that section. But restaurants can.
But it varies, they all have to provide free water though, most places filter there tap water so it’s generally OK.
But times are changing.
One of the things that usually blows people’s mind is that the Moore county, Tennessee where the Jack Daniels distillery is is a dry county, meaning you cannot purchase Jack Daniels there
These laws date back to pre-prohibition and the Temperance Movement. Alcoholism (and the associated problems like domestic violence) was a major problem in the US in the 19th century. On average Americans drank up to 7 gallons (26.5 liters) of alcohol annually, compared to 2 gallons (7.6 liters) of modern Americans.
To combat alcoholism, many towns enacted legal restrictions on when and where alcohol could be purchased. In most cases these “blue laws”, as they came to be known, simply were never repealed, even after the 18th Amendment was repealed.
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