Drunk Wednesday

Where your adult kids (or you) might be the night before Thanksgiving.

'Twas the night 'fore Thanksgiving

And out at the bars

All the people were drinking

Hope they're not driving cars!

Photo by Drew Farwell on Unsplash

I'm a poet and I wasn't even aware of it!

But it's true: The night before Thanksgiving is the number-one Wednesday night of the year for bars in the United States.

The anecdotal explanation is that we're a mobile nation now. Most Americans wind up moving away from the towns and cities where they grew up.

So, the end of November is one of the few days during the year on which a vast number of the disapora return home.

Thanksgiving itself is for family, the night before is for running into friends, high school classmates, and all those other people you only see once a year at the local watering hole.

At least for a significant subset of the U.S. population.

The analytical explanation, since we're also a data driven country now, comes from a restaurant management platform called Upserve, which says that it tracked 10,000 bars and found that they sell 63 percent more liquor on Drunk Wednesday (a/k/a Drunksgiving, a/k/a Blackout Wednesday, but that seems a little extreme) than they do on the day before, which we'll just call Regular Tuesday.

Interestingly, while drink sales go through the roof, food sales actually drop a bit, which Upserve suggests might be because most people on Wednesday are already thinking about how they'll be having a big meal on Thursday.

"With practically everyone having Thanksgiving Day off of work and no reason to wake up before football games begin, it's clear why this night has become a cultural phenomenon," the Upsell people wrote in a blog post highlighting their findings and urging their client bars and restaurants to take advantage of it.

This feels like a good place to add an unrelated but relevant study that tried to figure out how much people spend while drunk every year. It's staggering (pun intended).

This came from the folks at Finder.com, who asked 2,179 representative adults whether they’d made a recent purchase while they were under the influence of alcohol — and if so, how much they spent:

• Roughly 17 percent of survey respondents acknowledged making at least one drunk purchase over the past year. (Broken down by generation, Gen-Z was 28 percent, Gen-Y was 33 percent, Gen-X was 8 percent, and Boomers were 2 percent. Generation Alpha is still too young, thank God.)

• Average total spending while under the influence was $309, which would work out to about $14 billion.

• The number one category of drunk purchases by both men and women, according to the survey, was shoes, clothes, and accessories (46 percent of purchases reported by men, and 50 percent of those reported by women).

Back to Drunk Wednesday: Upserve suggests bars treat it like the sloppy, crazy, major event that it is, or at least has been for the last few years.

Among the suggestions: put away good beverage ware and go with plastic, hire bouncers, and post the numbers for taxi companies prominently. Although doesn't everyone have Uber now?

Anyway we have Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. Amazon clearly wants to get you thinking of Thanksgiving itself as Amazon Thursday.

But Drunk Wednesday--or Drinksgiving, your choice--is still up for grabs.

So go out, meet with friends, have a few drinks if that's your thing. If it's not, don't mind so much if your adult kids do -- as long as they drink plenty of water and don't drive.

Remember: The Main Event will always be the next day; Drunk Wednesday is just the warmup.

---

I just realized this is the second newsletter in a week with the word “drunk” in the title. It “just happened,” but I feel like I had to acknowledge it.

---

7 other things worth reading

• President-elect Trump said Monday he plans to impose additional tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada on January 20. Amid fears of inflation and a trade war, his declarations on Truth Social will be a wake up call for those who thought his tariff talk was bluster. Trump said the new tariffs were tied directly to the flows of drugs and migrants and include: a tariff of 25% on all goods from Canada and Mexico, along with an additional 10% tariff on goods from China in addition to any existing tariffs. (Axios)

• A DHL cargo plane crashed in Lithuania early Monday while approaching an airport, killing a Spanish crew member and injuring three others on board, officials said. The crash comes as Western security officials have previously told Reuters they suspect Russian intelligence of conducting test runs for acts of sabotage on cargo flights to the United States. (Fox Business)

• Trump's election interference case was dismissed Monday, after special counsel Jack Smith asked the judge to toss the case due to a Justice Department policy that bars the prosecution of a sitting president. Smith earlier Monday filed a motion to dismiss the separate classified documents case against Trump, all ahead of Trump's impending inauguration. (ABC News)

• ‘Busiest Thanksgiving ever’: How the TSA plans to handle record air travel. (AP)

• Americans looking to purchase a home in the next few years will have a tough pill to swallow, at least regarding mortgage rates. “The new normal will be around 6%,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, told reporters on a call Thursday. “We are not going to return to 3%, 4%, or 5% mortgage-rate conditions.” (CNN)

• Macy's delayed its quarterly results after the company discovered that an employee had hidden up to $154 million in corporate delivery expenses over several years, prompting an investigation. The retailer said Monday that a single employee, responsible for small-package delivery expense accounting, had intentionally made erroneous bookkeeping entries since late 2021. (WSJ)

• A Connecticut couple has been arrested for allegedly stealing $1 million in Lululemon products in a three-month span. Jadion Richards, 44, and Akwele Lawes-Richards, 45, were arrested earlier this month in Minnesota. From September through November, the couple is accused of committing thefts in Minnesota, Colorado, New York, Connecticut and Utah. (The Independent)

  ---

  Thanks for reading. Photo by Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!