The tale of how we are drinking
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