COVID study: Wine, liquor sales up as beer went down in 2020

When coronavirus-related shutdowns first hit the United States, people stocked up on alcohol — but not all kinds of drinks, a new study finds.

Sales for wine and spirits rose as people increasingly visited liquor stores in early 2020, according to research published this week.

But at the same time, data showed people were buying less beer. So, what was going on at the time of the apparent shift?

In March 2020, some popular spots for getting a pint — including bars and breweries — were starting to close due to fears about the spread of COVID-19. The new research suggests declining beer sales may have been tied to those closures.

To come up with the findings, researchers at the University at Buffalo in New York reported examining data from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and SafeGraph, a tool that captures anonymous location information from electronic devices.

Using alcohol sales figures and smartphone data, researchers said they looked at patterns in 16 states with available information, including Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas. They then created models to determine links between booze sales and visits to locations that sell alcohol, according to results published on Wednesday, Dec. 15.

Among the limitations, not all 50 states were covered and researchers excluded data from grocery stores, where shoppers may have snagged booze.

The study examined data from 2018 to 2020 and found some states saw as much as a 20 to 40% spike in sales of spirits at the beginning of the pandemic. On average, March 2020 saw a 10.7% increase in purchases when compared with the same months of the past two years, results show.

Four states — Kentucky, Missouri, Texas and Virginia — saw liquor sales go up each month from March to June 2020, and “such increases could be an alarming signal for increased problematic alcohol use in these states,” researchers said.

There was also a jump in wine sales, despite fewer people going to wineries less often during early coronavirus-related shutdowns. The largest spike was 8.7% in March, and sales “markedly increased” in most of the states observed, according to findings published in a PLOS One journal article obtained by McClatchy News.

“The pattern for beer sales is strikingly different from that for spirits and wine: beer sales decreased in March, April, and May, and only slightly increased in June,” researchers wrote. “The largest decrease occurred in March 2020 with a decrease of 7.1%.”

Researchers said some states bucked the alcohol trends. For example, though beer sales went down in most places, they were higher in Arkansas, Kansas and Texas.

When drink sales and alcohol-related businesses were compared, officials said the results “showed that people likely changed their alcohol purchasing behavior differently with regard to spirits, wine, and beer.”

While researchers say more examination is needed, the findings could have implications beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

“Understanding how alcohol purchase behavior is changed by events such as COVID is important because heavy alcohol use is known to be associated with numerous social problems, especially within the home,” Brian M. Quigley, research assistant professor of medicine at the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the school’s Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions, said in a news release.