3. Booze, Booze Everywhere

So Long Bounty Bars Hello Drunk Tank.

So awareness brings on a new focus. It feels like when you see one ant on the floor and then check again, refocus and it is in fact there is a ton of ants and they are everywhere. Alcohol is everywhere. It’s on TV, Instagram, Billboards, magazines and pictures of your mates on Facebook.

Everyday there has been a Covid article on broadcast news where people are bemoaning the loss of an hour of drinking or an article about another pub that may be forced to close. No one wants redundancies and bless all those in hospitality at the moment. I am not a zealot that wants this all shut down because I “can’t enjoy myself anymore”, but all we are doing is underlining the pedaling of the last legal drug as the best thing any of us can think of doing. 

I have personally found the pubs the safest places to be since the lifting of lockdown apart from my own home. You have to log in there; they keep you under control and for the most part and have been one of the most sensible places to visit. Or maybe I was pissed? In retail you are allowed to walk around willy-nilly without a test or trace QR code in sight, picking up stuff, coughing crap all over it and putting it back for the next sap to wander along and do the same. Hospitality should not have been scapegoated and the government have produced no science to back it up, but is this any surprise coming from the shower of shitheads we have in charge.

So I headed into a couple of these unmonitored environments recently. I have been to Morrisons and Sainsbury’s over the last week and was pretty shocked at how blatantly they shove booze in your face.

I popped into Morrisons in Chorlton Manchester for a few bits and pieces. I actually ended up spending forty quid on bits and pieces. I bought two cans of Black eye peas. I have never bought black-eye peas in my life. My mid-life crisis is manifesting itself in stranger and stranger ways. Given my new outlook I avoided buying any alcohol but Morrisons did their best to roll the marbles under my feet.

They had  loads of those stand alone cardboard units selling all kinds of different hard liquor. Most of it had no real purpose to be there and had no “adjacency”. (Retail jargon for being opposite, like placing bottles of Pimms near strawberries during Wimbledon, because as we all know, professional Tennis players are shit-faced all the time). So they had one of these units selling “Dead Man's Fingers” at the end of the bread aisle. I hadn’t seen this stuff before but the bottles were garish and luminous in colour and each one was emblazoned with a skull . They were almost admitting that the stuff contained is like poison. It looks like it is appealing to the kids that loved buying sour sweets and had just graduated on to the harder stuff. It was down the bloody bread aisle! A few days later I found two of these same stands in Sainsbury's down the yogurt and cheese aisles.

The worst was yet to come. Unfortunately they were busy in the Morrisons or had no staff or didn’t give a crap (delete as appropriate) and I had time in the long queue to check out the tills. Every single till front had more cardboard units this time selling Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum. It was a variation on the original in a subtle way,  so it was spiced with some exotic stuff that you should only mix with liquidated monkey’s pineal gland, but it was a litre bottle of hooch none-the-less. There must have been twenty bottles on each stand and around six stands. So a conservative estimate would be over 100 litres of hard liquor lined up as a quick impulse buy.  

                                              

So the supermarkets “listened” to the consumer about the removal of sweets from the till area so as to discourage children from asking for it. However they now think it is OK to put forty percent proof booze under people's noses during a global pandemic with cases of alcoholism and suicide on the rise. The supermarkets are one of the few places we can go to assuage our desire to purchase especially if you are enjoying the Government's wonderful new world of Tier Three. They have a social responsibility as we spend bucket loads of cash with them to help us through this and not sabotage us at every turn. 

In countries like Canada, supermarkets have only just started allowing craft beers and artisan wines into their supermarkets. In this country you used to have to buy this stuff in an Off License, where you could control who saw it and how it was sold. No system is perfect and I remember being a teenager trying to buy booze with my mates but at least it was not shoved in my consciousness from year dot. Is it fair that an adult with a child in tow who wants to buy some yogurt pots should have to pass strong alcohol on that aisle? I can decide not to visit the booze aisles, but I still have to pass this stuff and my choice has been removed.

I would call for these stands to be banned full-stop as there is no need for them whatsoever. The supermarkets have plenty of shelf space dedicated to alcohol.  I would say to supermarkets directly, if you want to take backhanders from the big alcohol companies then at least have the social responsibility to put the results of this in more appropriate areas.