We rolled into New Hampshire on Sunday night around 7pm. Checked into our hotel and set out in finding a place to eat dinner. This took longer than we thought it would, and by the time we got done with it all it was 10:00pm and I really wanted some adult beverages to end out the evening.
Now, we came into NH from MA and there were scads of signs directing us to the ‘New Hampshire State Liquor Stores’ as soon as we crossed the border. Heck, our hotel was right across the road from one of them, so at 10:00pm I went to grab some hooch.
No go. Store’s closed.
I hit up a local gas station, found some beer, and asked the clerk about that. Turns out you can only buy liquor from a state store. I wasn’t surprised, I’ve seen that type of system in other states. North Carolina comes to mind.
I got a chuckle out of that. “Live Free or Die” being the state’s motto and yet they’ve got liquor control laws worse than Michigan’s! Hah!
Still, we had to check this out the next day. We rolled up around 11am to the store on Monday morning and saw about, oh, 20-ish cars in the parking lot.
“Maybe they actually do need this kinda liquor control!” I said. Of course, this was Columbus Day, which is an actual holiday out in New England I hear, so perhaps there was some increased traffic.
We walk in and I’m dumbstruck by the prices. Stuff’s going for half what it does back in Michigan. Pieces of the puzzle start coming together. I realize that NH doesn’t tax liquor, they just control the sale of it and take a profit in the handling of the matter.
Put another way: Rather than tax the industry to death they’re actually using the power of the state to keep it cheap and subsidizing the distribution of it. Sure, the store hours suck, but the prices are great. In Michigan a 750ml bottle of Absolut runs $20. In New Hampshire it’s $22 for a 1.75L bottle. You like scotch? Cutty Sark is $23 for a 1.75L bottle. You get the idea. It’s cheap.
Oh, and I finally found a bottle of Kalashnikov vodka. It’s not shaped like an AK-47 at all, like what was originally planned when I hear about it years ago, but I still had to buy it just because.
