So I took the kids out for pizza the other night. Unfortunately, the restaurant didn’t serve alcohol. However, our waitress explained that we could walk upstairs to the tavern, get a drink and bring it back to the restaurant.
“We have an arrangement with them,” the waitress explained helpfully. “We don’t serve booze and they don’t serve pizza.”
A little inconvenient…but works for me. So I walked upstairs and ordered a beer for me and a glass of wine for Gia, who had stayed in the pizza shop with the kids. To which the bartender explained that he could only sell me the beer, not the wine.
Huh?
“We can only sell you one drink to take out because we don’t know who the other drink is for,” the bartender sheepishly explained, noting it wasn’t his rule. Apparently it’s part of the government’s insane and often stupid over-regulation of alcohol sales in a futile effort to keep booze out of the hands of the underaged – you know, like 20-year-old soldiers returning home from Afghanistan.
So I had to buy my beer, take it down to the restaurant, then send Gia up to the bar, buy her glass of wine separately, and bring it back to the restaurant.
Seriously, think about how stupid this is.
The bartender is allowed to sell me a beer to take out of his establishment and into the establishment downstairs where he has no idea who I might give it to, but he couldn’t sell to me, at the same time, a companion glass or wine for my wife because he has no idea who I might give it to.
By this government-inspired “logic,” shouldn’t package liquor stores be banned from selling me a six pack of Bud Lights under the argument that the seller has no idea who I might give one of the six beers to once I leave the establishment?
When are we going to stop treating grown adults in purportedly the freest nation in the universe like little children? Alas, it appears no time soon.
