The Stranger should start lobbying in Olympia. Y'all seem very passionate about the bizarre and outdated liquor laws of Washington State. They make no sense to me either. Let's lobby Olympia together.
I fondly remember legally drinking alcohol on Crown Land during military ops when they gave us 18 yo soldiers our required rum rations in the Canadian Army.
Silly Americans ...
Remember people: friends don't let friends drink and - um, eat.
I remember trying to explain to my English language students in Prague that in America it is illegal to drink a beer in the park. They had a hard time getting their minds around that one, with America being the land of the free and all. I'm not sure if how I'd even find the words to explain the idiocy behind these rules on cooking class drinking.
@3 - well, if you ate, you might throw it up, so that kind of makes sense.
Back in my tender years (which coincided with the rise of Reaganism) the drinking age was 19 in Iowa (when my sister was young, it was 18).
Thus, youth got all their binge drinking out of the way early on, and learned how to handle their booze. It was also no big deal for an underage person to be in a bar, as long as there was a fairly coherent adult around who was willing to take responsibility for them. Thus, the "mystique" of drinking was considerably lessened.
Compare that to Washington, where it was only recently that bars were allowed to have things like windows and accompanied minors, and private cooking schools get shut down for emulating Julia Childs.
It was also during my long-lost youth that the Iowa state run liquor stores went the way of the dial telephone, and the grocery stores took over the selling of booze - with much more efficiency, and no noticeable increase in either drunk driving or alcoholism.
And this is Iowa I'm talking about - nominally a red state, nominally in the "Bible belt".
Why we can't get rid of that moronic collection of Barney Fifes that we call the WSLCB is beyond me. Let the police do the policing, and let the groceries do the selling. If we want to throw a bone to the unions (who are one of the main opponents of privatizing the liquor sales) then make it so only the big unionized chains can get contracts to sell liquor.
But suggest this to any politician, from "far left" to "far right" and you would think I was suggesting state-sponsored Bible burnings to be held every Christmas Eve.
This is a very weird place.
There's probably still archaic laws from prohibition, is my guess. According to my grandparents - servers were not to allow any patron carrying their beverage in an establishment until the 70's. I'm sure enough business owners complained and they did something finally.
Unfortunately, most bar and resteraunt owners today have enough to deal with (ie - Nickel's own booze-sting operations) so this case is likely not to be something they'd fight for.
What I'd be curious to know however is who complains about this stuff and how does the WSLCB vet for cranks or neighboring business looking to sink the competition?
The Washington State Liquor Board is one of those old saws left over from a different time which cannot rightly be altered, changed, or modified to fit the needs and desires of its owners.....us! It needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up reflecting not its own interests, but the interests of and the purposes purposed by the citizens of Washington State.
Unfortunately, the Stranger only tilts at transportation-related windmills, nowadays.
@7: it's much worse than that. To buy liquor in this state, you used to have to go to a state-run store AND ASK A CLERK FOR IT. No browsing, no open shelves at all. If you didn't know the name of a brand, you couldn't have it. The only bottles on display were on a shelf behind the counter, a very limited selection (usually just one brand of gin, one brand of bourbon, etc.) Needless to say, there was a great deal of corruption, as distributors would pay bribes to get their brand on that shelf.
Seattle also used to be a town of (beer-only) taverns, as hard liquor sales were restricted to a handful of downtown restaurants, usually ones with great political connections (like the various Rossellini's). And this wasn't any microbrew or import shit, either; it was Oly, Rainier, and Bud in schooners (10-ounce glasses). Whatever happened to schooners? Does anybody sell beer in them anymore?
Not only were cocktails scarce, the WSLCB used to "protect" Washington wine producers - you couldn't easily get non-Washington wines, even most restaurants didn't carry them - so we had some really shitty, expensive wines in this state.
WSLCB officers, in cahoots with the SPD, used to shake down tavern owners - especially minority and gay bar owners. That's one of the reasons why the GSBA was founded.
If Eyeman really were concerned about fiscal responsibility, he'd have filed an initiative against them long ago.
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