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Comment by abujazar | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian here. The reason for the quotas is historical and were put in place to limit miners' consumption of beer and liquor. Interestingly there's practically no quota on wine, presumably because miners didn't care much for that.

You can't buy wine and liquor at local stores in Norway Svalbard, but there is a great selection in the state run monopoly stores (Vinmonopolet). In Longyearbyen there's one called Nordpolet (The North Pole, a pun on "pol" meaning both pole and being an abbrevation for monopoly).

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Pennsylvania has monopoly state stores for liquor too.

When weddings used to last for days, the mine bosses here would go to the beer and liquor stores and tell them to stop selling to that group of people. Then when the drinks ran out, the wedding would end and the miners would go back to work.

More recently, the PA state-run liquor stores shut down for weeks during the covid scare and when they did open up, they only took a very limited number of orders online and over the phone. It was basically impossible to buy hard alcohol here for over a month. People were driving to other states to get it.

I could see it coming. I rarely buy anything, but picked up a bottle or two about 2 days before they announced the closure.

I guess technically it's not a full monopoly since they do allow distillers in the state to sell thier own product on premise. The place near me was selling some premixed handles for $60-80. Talk about price gouging.

[PA Resident] You could (and still can) order liquor from PA distillers and have it shipped to your home! I remember not having to sign for anything and thinking sub-21 year old me would have loved this information. A nice workaround during the shutdowns

The US has a wild variety of drink laws that vary by state.

Many states have government run stores, some states allow beer and wine at grocery stores, but liquor must be sold in a separate store. Some states have laws that ban sales after 8pm, some 2am.

Utah is the worst because they limit the alcohol percentage in beer (Mormons don't drink and pushed for these laws) so the companies have to make special shittier Utah beers.

In some states you're not allowed to see the drink being made (maybe also Utah - can't remember) so they make it out of sight and bring it out.

Some counties are dry and you have to drive to the one over (usually lots of stores at the county line). I think some southern states have drive through liquor stores.

One reason I was happy to move to California is the lack of these 'blue laws' [0]. California may have a lot of signs warning you that everything causes cancer (and make it really hard to order a new shower head), but their alcohol laws are pretty permissive.

I don't know if there are any states that don't have open container laws - which is too bad, drinking PIMs in the park in the UK was great fun, and beers outside talking to people is a nice part of the London pub culture that would go well in American cities.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_law

> California may have a lot of signs warning you that everything causes cancer, but their alcohol laws are pretty permissive.

Bars still close at 2am, though, which is lame.

Yeah true - they've tried to pass a 4am law a couple of times I think, but it's failed.

The Svalbard link reminds me of these stories about the volunteer bar in the research base in antarctica:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/on...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/10/experie...

In south Carolina, right after prohibition up until a few decades ago, you were not allowed to advertise any signs (taller than 3 inches) on a liquor store that indicated you were a liquor store. So they marked themselves with big red circular dots instead (starting around 1940s). The laws have since relaxed but many liquor store still use the red dot and are often referred to as "red dot stores"

>I don't know if there are any states that don't have open container laws

Louisiana is one. Most people associate New Orleans with drinking in public, but I believe there's no statewide law against it.

> I don't know if there are any states that don't have open container laws - which is too bad, drinking PIMs in the park in the UK was great fun, and beers outside talking to people is a nice part of the London pub culture that would go well in American cities

That's a big thing in Spain too, they even have a word for it (botellón). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botell%C3%B3n

Here there's a big square where people sit in the sun during the day in small groups and drink.. Nothing wrong with that IMO.

Random, but Longyearbyen should be on the "List of things that are surprisingly named after people." (e.g. German Chocolate Cake isn't from Germany, it's named after Samuel German).

I always thought it was named because staying at in such an isolated place, with month-long days and nights, for even a short period would feel like a "long year", but found on the Wikipedia page that it's actually named after John Munro Longyear.

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