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Rhode Island didn’t allow any alcohol sales on Sundays until 2004. I just learned that they changed those laws. In college we had to drive across the border into Massachusetts to get beer on Sundays.

My first professional job in theater was working at a summer theater in Prestonsburg, KY. Prestonsburg was in a dry county, so many times after shows you’d see a bunch of actors in a frenzy to get to their cars and head for a store on the other side of the county line before it was too late to buy alcohol.

beermestrength

-xtien

When I was a little kid back in ancient times, we took the Super Chief train (yes, a real passenger train before Amtrak) from Chicago to LA. At that time, Kansas prohibited selling liquor by the drink (this lasted until 1987), so they kept the club car closed while the train crossed the state. As the train approached the Colorado state line, there must have been about 50 men lined up at the club car door waiting for it to open. Apparently a lot of counties in Kansas still have some type of restriction on alcohol sales. In the map below, yellow means some kind of restriction, such as requiring the establishment to receive a certain percentage of sales from food. Red means a dry county.

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One more on the list of reasons I would never want to live in Kansas.

@rowe33 look what you are getting yourself into with your talk of moving there ;)

Yeah I lived in one of those yellow blotches in Louisiana for a long time, even during college. On the upside, drinking age was over 18 there until way past my 21st birthday. But liquor laws were weird, there weren’t any liquor stores in my county, but you could have beer and mixed drinks at restaurants. But just on the county line there were a bunch of liquor stores, so you just drive five miles down the road to get what you needed. Laws are weird.

HA, we’re not really big drinkers so it’ll have a negligible effect on us. But judging by the amount of alcohol at the July 4th party we went to in KC, people are managing! I also grew up in Arlington, TX, so I’m used to some weirdness with liquor sales. I don’t think they had liquor stores that could sell on certain days or in Arlington or something like that.

NEW YORK still won’t sell beer till noon on Sunday. (2016 they changed law to allow 10 AM in restaurants.) Why are you looking at Rhode Island!

That train story, Jason, reminds me of one of the times I went to Sundance. It was 2007 and I think the Steelers were in the Super Bowl that year, which fell on a Sunday during the film festival. The woman I was staying with, my aunt-in-law, came up to Park City to see a couple movies and hang out to watch some of the game with me (this was back when I still watched NFL games).

At that time in Utah, you couldn’t go into a bar and just order a drink. There was some weird state law that required you to be a member of some kind of club. I never quite understood the reasoning of it, but the logistics were that you paid a small fee at the restaurant/bar and after that you could order drinks.

So weird.

-xtien

Oh hey that reminds me, Dallas was like that too - may still be, but I don’t get there very much anymore. I just remember being there for work a few times, this would have been late 90s, maybe 2000, and I had to get a card I could show at restaurants. I had to join a club to get a drink. Never seen that anywhere else.

That was also true in the Chicago suburb I used to live in. I had a part-time job running the liquor dept. in supermarket and we had to keep it closed and roped off on Sunday mornings. During football season you could always count on someone wanting to buy beer in time for the 12:00 kickoff:

“Sorry, no can do.”
“But I want beer for the kickoff!”
“Well, you need to buy it on Saturday or go to a neighboring town.”
“Can’t you just sell me one case?”
“Sorry, but that case isn’t worth our license.”

IIRC restaurants lobbied heavily for this due to brunch. Nobody wanted brunch without alcohol.

Even my neighborhood bodega I frequented observed this 12 AM rule. I was pretty young, and the guy let me buy beer under 21. But the 12 AM rule, nope!

Atlanta’s in three counties, and the airport straddles two of them. For a long time bars in one concourse had different operating rules than bars in the other ones.

haha, that cracks me up. He would break the underage law, but not the noon law. Man’s got to know his limits!

Looks like most of PA is yellow, but I can’t remember any of the specifics laws, even though I grew up in the heart of all that yellow. I know PA has State stores, where you have to go to purchase bottles of liquor and wine.

Jeebus, look at Arkansas. It’s full of red! It hates alcohol!

-Tom

Yes, PA, and OH have state stores, which I think is why those 2 states have all that yellow.

It’s the damn quaker laws.

Yeah, until recently we could only get beer at distributors, now grocery stores and convenience shops carry beer. They also can carry wine!

The hard stuff is still limited to the State Stores.

We also can’t have it shipped to us from out of state (other than wine), so if the state LCB doesn’t carry a drink you want, you’re just out of luck.