Society’s love affair with booze waning as alcohol sales plummet
Is it possible that society is starting to see through alcohol’s ruse that it makes our lives better in any way?
If you base it on consumer behavior, that certainly seems like a possibility.
I came across two articles this week showing that alcohol sales have plummeted this year in the UK and in my own booze-soaked country.
And counter to what you might expect, it’s young people leading the way in passing on the poison.
In my lovely home country of Canada, our government statistics department last week noted that, in 2022, alcohol sales decline for the first time in 10 years.
That comes on the heels of new and somewhat controversial safe drinking guidelines here that brought down recommended booze intake from 14 drinks per week to just 2 or less.
Some of the drop in alcohol sales is likely due to out-of-control inflation, but an overall change in attitudes also has a big role to play.
More focus on good health
Just look around this site and see how many articles there are on health topics like exercise, better eating habits, mindfulness, meditation, and mental health.
I imagine you’ve also noticed more people talking about these things in your everyday life.
The thing about alcohol is that it instantly vetoes all the good health decisions you’re trying to make in other areas.
As the Canadian Cancer Society (CSS) notes in this piece, drinking booze increases your odds of getting nine (!) types of cancer.
Meanwhile, abstaining has life-changing health benefits.
As the CCS’s senior manager of health policy notes, you’ll have “increased energy, better concentration, sleeping better and just the sense of achievement for not feeling like you need a drink.”
Demographics are also coming into play.
Young people are passing on poison
A polling company here called Ipsos Canada has evidently been tracking a decline in alcohol use for more than a decade.
The vice president of that firm told CTV news that it’s “due to younger generations, including Gen Z and younger Millennials, drinking less than predecessor generations.”
Meanwhile, in the UK, Bloomberg reports that alcohol sales there dropped 9% year-over-year, thanks in large part to young people passing on the poison.
Beer sales were down 10%, while no-to-low alcohol sales rose 3%.
A couple statistics jumped out at me from that Bloomberg piece:
- In 2021, the number of people aged 16–24 who said they didn’t drink in the last week was 63% versus 33% in 2002
- In 2021, people aged 16–24 who drank more than 3 units of alcohol in the past week was 22% versus 48% in 2002
That’s a huge drop in drinking among young people, and it’s great to see.
Young people are smarter than us
Young people may not have the benefit of a lot of life experience like 40+ folks like myself, but I marvel at how sharp my kids are in terms of protecting their health and their environment.
They think about things we never did at their age.
Clearly, young people are weighing the overwhelming evidence that booze is terrible for you, and they’re starting to see through the slick marketing by Big Alcohol that suggests their lives would be more fun and better off if they drank.
(Just as my generation — the elder Millenials — and Gen X came to that realization with smoking).
As one student told Bloomberg:
“I don’t need alcohol to have fun. Increasingly around me, people feel the same way. It’s become totally normal in my university to say, ‘I don’t drink.’”
I love to read this kind of thing and it gives me a lot of hope for the future.
So, does the drop in alcohol sales portend the end of alcohol?
Maybe not completely — some people do still smoke, after all — but as The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober author Catherine Gray told Bloomberg:
“There’s still a long way to go but there’s definitely an improved attitude towards people who don’t drink … Ten years from now, I think half the population won’t drink alcohol anymore at all.”
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