Tuesday, February 17, 2009
40 Jealous Whores / Hannan / Legislature Budweiser Sees Your Single-Beer Ban and Raises You Two
Posted by Caleb Hannan on Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:08 AM
It's a nice reminder that when government intrudes, the market adjusts.
H/T: Washington City Paper
Comments (14)
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And the market adjustments receive free PR assists from the media.
It looks a little more clumsy than a single serve and thus harder to stash quickly, unless you're carrying it intact back to your own residence. Maybe the hoodlums and the owners will get the message that convenience is going to be harder to come by short of safer, less blighted conditions.
Based on my experience suspicious behavior at 7th & Garfield went elsewhere when a single serve store was shut down last year after a shooting and then later when the beer board closed it. If banning single serves don't work, then we move on to the next step.
Keep in mind that your side is the one with slum lords, the developers, and beer industry lobbyists, who capitalize on the poor in urban neighborhoods.
If you don't like single serve bans, then why aren't you offering alternative legislative ideas to solving the blight and crime that breeds around single-serve stores?
Or maybe we're just against the forces of yuppie gentrification, the people who move into battered neighborhoods so they can claim themselves cool and urban and street, then set about trying to pass more rules than an upscale subdivision Cool Springs.
But just for your edification, Mike, we'll do our best to avoid covering anything that runs contrary to your opinion in the future. Please continue to let us know when we're violating orthodoxy.
Those look like 20 oz cans, too. If you have a jacket, you can put one in your right pocket, one in your left pocket, and drink the third out of a paper bag. And with 60 oz of beer in you, instead of the 40 oz that come from the current big single-serve bottles, you'll be drunker and have to pee more, possibly in public.
I think that picture is enough to bury the bad idea of a single serve beer ban. I understand the idea that convenience stores attract a few vagrants, and so it's easier to think you can turn off the beer spigot that attracts them then actually enforcing laws against vagrancy, public intoxication, and public urination, but this bill won't do squat.
Jeez, Kotz, could you at least have been a tad pithier? I didn't really read any invective into S-Town Mike's commentary, but apparently the chip on your shoulder did.
I'd honestly like to know your opinion on what, besides yuppie gentrification and rule-making, you propose to do to give "battered neighborhoods" the tools to rid their streets of crime and improve their chances at attracting good neighbors, businesses, and the kind of traffic that keeps a neighborhood safe?
If we're going to ban single-beer sales because they are a nuisance, can we also ban sales of liquor bottles in sizes smaller than a quart? I can't tell you how many airplane-sized, pint, half-pint and other smaller bottles of rot gut liquor I find littering my neighborhood every morning, spreading shards of glass where people are trying to walk their dogs. Who buys a flask-sized bottle of vodka, downs it in the car, and then tosses it out the car window, anyway?
And while we're banning all of this nuisance stuff I'd like to put an immediate ban on all fast food drive-throughs. I can't tell you how many discarded bags of food from Krystal, Wendy's and McDonald's end up on my street. It's disgusting. Look, people, if you're going to eat in your car, don't toss the trash out the car window. Wait until you get home. Cripes, were you raised in a barn or what? You know, it's not healthy shoving that greasy crap down your gullet anyway. Get out of the car and eat at a table like a civilized person.
Think I'll have any luck? I'm thinking ... not.
Don't just blame single serve beer for the blight within a "battered neighborhood".
And how about using the tax revenue for the treatment of said residents, rather then shooing them out to another area of town?
Oh give it a rest, Kotz. The Scene's entire readership is yuppies. And let's not act like revitalization of one of the city's most historic neighborhoods is a bad thing. I remember when Germantown had depleted into a virtual ghost town. Now, it's breathing again. Yeah ... damn those "forces of yuppie gentrification."
I'm not against yuppie gentrification, just the one-size-fits-all rules that occasionally come with it. In this case, we're trying to stop a few bums and supposed bad guys from loitering. But to do so, we're going to ban a whole lot of normal, working, not-bothering-anybody people from buying single beers too. Go to any convenience store between 5 and 6, and you'll find a ton of people buying these after work. Maybe they're just thirsting for one beer. Maybe it's all they can afford.
So it just seems kind of narcissistic to seek to curtail the ways of many just to soothe the problems of a few. And these ideas seem to come far too often from the gentrifiers, who move into a neighborhood, then begin to legislate the behavior of everyone else.
Seeing as how Nashville police are into that whole broken window theory -- the traffic version -- why not keep calling the cops on the bums if they're causing trouble? Or maybe just handle it the old fashion way? Mike's a vociferous guy. Why not go down to the corner and raise hell with the bums himself? There are a lot of alternatives to blanket legislation that captures more good guys than bad.
But you're right, Brandon, I should have been less pissy and more pithy.
Kotz,
Sorry if I sounded hostile. I just enjoy seeing people move inside the 440-circle again.
Kotz: Why would you assume that we have not been organizing, calling the cops, documenting and reporting illegal activities? What makes you believe that I am merely acting alone trying to lobby for something on high without ever having tried anything else? Why don't you ever pay attention when I write that the police, the beer board, the neighborhood association has been working on enforcement for years and conditions only got worse (not just litter and vagrancy but harassment of pedestrians, selling to minors, drug deals, off-loading school bus kids who have to traverse various urinators, at least two shootings last year, proximity of singularly focused beer sales to a mission with women in recovery, oh, and today we reported squatters in a vacant house across the street from the market)?
When these blighted convenience stores start being the gateway for other crimes in the community, I'll support efforts to make their primary product more inconvenient to obtain. Caleb writes as if the monolithic industry has unlimited resources to repackage based on any obstacles thrown up. I'm willing to bet otherwise. I'm willing to bet that like most predators the single serve industry--from producer to supplier--prefers to pick off the weakest at the fringes, but if the herd turns and the risks get too high, then they pull back.
It costs Bud to repackage the beer, and to do so for every community where it encounters resistance. I'm willing to bet that there is some point where repackaging again and again to deal with changes in local codes is going to get cost prohibitive. That's not one-size fits all rules generated in suburbia. That's attempting to wear down the "convenience" of an industry that exploits the homeless population that you claim to be defending. If you don't see the industrial exploitation, then in my opinion you're willfully blind.
I ponder the bloggers here who write like they're lecturing others from some deep experience of the streets. I've lived in several of Nashville's close-in neighborhoods since 1989. The last time I lived in suburbia was 1985. Where do Scene journalists live?
I'm gathering from the silence that you guys don't live in Cayce, Jackson Courts or Napier.
It's easy to hold on to your high, misguided ideals about targeted alcohol marketing to the working and lower classes when you don't have to deal with the fall-out in your neighborhoods. Some of us choose to be more pragmatic and use tools that come to us, including single-serve regulation. If you don't like the fixes offered then come up with your own.
Or you can just sit around and bitch about it.
RE-package beer? You really think someone tears apart a six pack to repackage it as three? Get a clue. Busch is sophisticated enough to plan for and package appropriately off the line whatever configuration is needed by the seller. Your idea of a solution just ups the ante so now your drunks will get 60oz instead of 40's
