Lockdown and Kiwi drinkers
As the nation went into lockdown, there was a lastminute rush on alcohol sales. That was just the start of a stilldeveloping tale of how we’re drinking, writes Steve Kilgallon.
Simon Mackenzie owns a bottle store, wine bar and restaurant in Auckland’s Northcote Point. All three, of course, are closed right now. But he’s been kept busy during lockdown, loading his stationwagon with boxes of wine to drop off to local customers.
‘‘Online sales have been a lifeline,’’ says Mackenzie, who adds that wine drinkers within a couple of kilometres of his Point Wines store have been four-fifths of his lockdown trade.
‘‘Before, the web was about 10 per cent of turnover – it’s gone from 10 to 100 per cent. It’s been a lot stronger than I expected.’’
Covid-19 has forced the booze industry to gallop headlong into the digital world – and take its customers with it.
Still, sales are well down. With bars and bottle stores closed, online orders have covered only a fraction of the lost trade. And while New Zealand made a frantic toilet roll-style rush to stock up on beer and wine before lockdown began, it’s probably not true that most of us have spent lockdown parked on the couch getting sozzled. In fact, evidence suggests many have taken the chance to cut down.
Booze online
Noticed your Facebook feed swarming with advertisements from liquor stores offering home delivery deals? I have, and I’m not alone. In the first 48 hours after online sales were allowed, Alcohol Healthwatch executive director Nicki Jackson says she got 50 adverts on her feed.
‘‘In my view, the Covid crisis has speeded up changes that were probably going to occur anyway,’’ she says. ‘‘But it’s happened overnight really.’’
In the US, online booze sales are up 234 per cent on this time last year. It’s much less marked here, but Health Promotion Agency research says one in seven drinkers were buying alcohol online during lockdown, and half of those were buying online for the first time.
For Jackson, the shift comes with concerns. ‘‘The industry will tell you we could do this before Covid anyway,’’ she says. ‘‘Covid speeded the process up
. . . but going online has extra ramifications for our most harmful drug.’’
All off-licences already had the right to sell online before lockdown began – it’s just that most never exercised it.
When lockdown was announced, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) included alcohol on its list of essential services, to ‘‘avert a rush of purchasing liquor supplies as we transitioned to alert level 4’’. Only supermarkets and stores in licensing trust-controlled areas, however, were allowed to open.
Initially, MBIE permitted offlicences to trade online. Then the rules changed and only companies with ‘‘remote seller’’ licences (that is, without an actual bricks-and-mortar store) could trade.
A week later, MBIE reversed that, possibly because the law permitted all off-licences to sell online without further restriction. As long as their online shopfront had tickboxes to ‘‘prove’’ buyers were over 18, they were good to go.
What that means, says Jackson, is nobody has any idea how many liquor stores are trading online – so how can they be monitored to ensure they stick to the rules?
‘‘It is the Wild West,’’ she says. ‘‘We don’t know who is out there selling and who they are selling to – and if they are selling out of hours.’’
Alcohol Healthwatch has been joined by organisations such as the Salvation Army and Health Alliance Aotearoa in calling for tighter regulation.
Stores will now have captured people’s personal information and can market to them with more sophistication, Jackson argues, and she says online retail will increase inequity: that is, there is already an over-supply of bottle stores in deprived areas, and putting them online only emphasises that.
More availability means more harm, and she thinks online sales should be banned – as they have been in South Africa – or at least restricted.
The online marketing campaigns have concerned other groups. ‘‘They’ve been desperate to make sales over this period, so a number of them have been quite a lot more aggressive in their promotion and marketing than normal,’’ says Grant Hewison, from pressure group Communities Against Alcohol Harm.
But it would be wrong to portray online sales as the panacea for an industry experiencing a steep decline. ‘‘We have seen stories about massive increases in online sales. However, it doesn’t reflect the accurate picture,’’ says Bridget McDonald, from the Alcohol Beverages Council, an industry lobby group. The truth is, she says, pre-Covid online sales were about 2 per cent of the market. It has grown, but she estimates it probably only covers 15-20 per cent of usual retail figures.
While supermarkets have taken up some of the slack, she says the industry is down 20-30 per cent overall. And that, in part, is because it seems we are all drinking a lot less.
Buy more, drink less
In Australia, the Hello Sunday Morning campaign – for those trying to quit, or cut intake – reported a 12 per cent rise in registrations as the virus hit. In the UK, heavy drinkers are drinking more, but light and moderate drinkers are drinking less.
Jackson suspects that’s the likely pattern here, too.
The Health Promotion Agency’s numbers show onethird of Kiwis haven’t touched a drop in lockdown (the survey is normally annual, and 20 per cent would say they’ve not drunk in a year).
And among those who are drinking, some are clearly embracing new lifestyles. Lowcarb beer sales have risen 60 per cent, and McDonald says the industry is predicting a postlockdown surge in low and noalcohol beer.
So the panic buying before lockdown – Nielsen figures showed a 36 per cent spike in alcohol sales in the four weeks to April 19 – may have been misleading. The assumption is the next round of figures will show that dropping away.
‘‘Those heavy sales when people were thinking ‘Whoosh, I might never have a bottle of wine again’ have tapered off – and because people bought it, doesn’t mean they’ve consumed it,’’ says McDonald. ‘‘People have been quite moderate.’’
But if you are among those whose intake has increased, you may be entitled to a pass this time, if you can cut back once normality returns.
Researchers say increased stress can lead to heavier drinking, but one American scientist, Priscilla Martinez, told the Guardian it was ‘‘good to acknowledge the total bizarreness of the situation we’re in. It’s unlikely this will be the rest of our lives. What we’re doing now doesn’t have to be permanent.’’
A bureaucratic bungle
Hugh Grierson was open. Then he was closed. Then open. Then closed. Now he’s selling again, but with a process involving customers waving their phones at him from a distance to show bank transfer payments.
Grierson’s Hopscotch Brewing – a West Auckland brewery and off-licence – has been the victim of a unique piece of bureaucratic bungling, but it’s symptomatic of how the Government has struggled to legislate the industry under Covid-19. It has been, he says, a ‘‘debacle’’.
West Auckland is a licensing trust area, which means the local trust has a monopoly on alcohol sales, and supermarkets and other rivals cannot sell booze. Thanks to loopholes, just five
rival off-licences have permission to trade in the region; Hopscotch is one of those.
Recognising that Westies would travel across town to buy booze if the trusts outlets shut, MBIE’s initial rules for the region said the trusts off-licences could open, but independent stores had to close.
Then they said everyone could open (Grierson did huge trade). Then briefly, and surely accidentally, they said West Auckland’s supermarkets could sell alcohol. Then Grierson had to close again. Then he interpreted a change in the wording to mean he could reopen – but a week later, he was firmly told to close his doors again. MBIE said the series of changes in the rules were ‘‘to provide clarity over which shops were permitted to open’’.
Meanwhile, the trusts struggled to control custom at the 10 stores they had opened (they closed others). Queues of up to three hours were reported, with some customers waiting that long only to be turned away at 5pm. A click and collect scheme was quickly shelved.
For a brief time, the trusts stores were also the only place in New Zealand you could physically purchase spirits, so people travelled to buy.
‘‘It’s just ridiculous,’’ one customer who quit the queue after several hours told Stuff.
Says Grierson: ‘‘It was blatantly obvious to anyone who knows anything about human nature that people were going to be driving across town [to buy spirits], and they were.’’
There would be an outcry if, say, the Mad Butcher were permitted to trade and the Aussie Butcher wasn’t, he says. Under level 3, he has reopened – but in an awkward, contactless way. He’s making about $200 a day – versus $600 before coronavirus. It’s enough, he says, to pay his bills and ‘‘some’’ of his rent.
‘‘We are going backwards right now, like everyone is except for supermarkets and trusts stores. I hope I don’t go into receivership, but I’ve watched my competition trade for five weeks whilst I was locked out purely because I don’t have the right owner.’’
Drinking in a downturn
We were already a nation of home drinkers even before we were told to stay at home.
Some 84 per cent of us, an unusually high figure by world standards, would normally drink in our own homes.
With a recession coming, will that trend accelerate? Some slowdown is inevitable as people become cost-conscious – except, says Jackson, for groups like ‘‘males under huge psychological distress’’, who will drink more.
Mackenzie, the wine store owner, is sure home consumption must have risen under level 4, at least among his customer base. The big question for him is whether under level 2 they will feel confident enough to return to his wine bar.
He certainly expects them to keep coming to his bottle store – but to be watching the price tags. ‘‘After the GFC, we saw consumption didn’t change – but the dollar spend did,’’ he says.
He’s planning to stock a cheaper range of wines. ‘‘From a consumer point of view, there will probably be much better deals.’’
Bridget McDonald fears those worried for their jobs might skip the pub, keep drinking at home, and continue a shift the industry has already noticed, from premium beers to ‘‘value’’ brands. ‘‘No-one,’’ she says, ‘‘wants to buy champagne at a time like this.’’
‘‘It is the Wild West. We don’t know who is out there selling [online], and who they are selling to.’’