Drunk graphics
DOT loves data has produced an analysis of alcohol consumption in NZ last year, and Justin Lester tweeted a graphic.
It’s interesting to see the impact of the lockdowns, though it’s very limiting that that the graphic refers only to liquor stores (and maybe supermarkets?) and is in terms of cash spent rather than alcohol purchased, and is only for the start of the first lockdown. The ‘increase’ includes stocking up for consumption during lockdown, as well as any real increase in consumption. Obviously, even if total alcohol consumption had remained the same, expenditures at liquor stores would have increased with pubs and restaurants closed. And even if total consumption had decreased it’s possible that expenditures at liquor stores could have increased.
Judging from last year, we should get StatsNZ’s alcohol sales data for 2020 around the end of February, which will allow a more useful comparison.
One positive point about the graphic, though: the areas of the bottle things on the graphic are actually proportional to the numbers they represent. For example, Tauranga City’s number went up 115%, and the bottle (on my screen) is 715×274 pixels compared to 490×186 pixels for 2019, a factor of 2.15. You often don’t see that.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Agree, but a caution on the excise data.
Foreign visitors account for at least some of the alcohol purchased here.
If they all disappear, then a year-on-year comparison can artificially look like a drop in consumption.
There will also be a bit of a problem in the excise data that piles of alcohol in kegs was destroyed but they couldn’t get the excise back on it. It was a big issue for the alcohol companies during lockdown. Excise is paid when product leaves bond. But you can’t get a refund on excise for destroyed product unless the destruction is overseen by a customs official, and there was no way they were going to be doing that during lockdown. And while it would have been perfectly reasonable to allow the local liquor licensing officers to act in place of customs officials for that purpose at that point, nobody in govt had the bandwidth to be thinking about it – it wasn’t a priority for anybody other than the alcohol companies stuck refunding bars for returned product that was going to have to be destroyed as stale, but unable to recoup the paid excise.
3 years ago
My understanding is that it is only beer that gets stale which also means they have to make beer quite close to consumption anyway. The amount destroyed should have ramped off pretty quickly.
3 years ago
Packaged beer has a fairly normal shelf life of 12 months, its the tap beer barrels for bars that might be a shorter time – once ‘tapped’. It would be a tiny proportion of production.
3 years ago