There will be no more bastardization of six packs in Costa Mesa.
]
The Costa Mesa City Council voted unanimously Tuesday that alcoholic beverages must be sold in their manufactured packages, according to a Daily Pilot report. In other words, bottles and cans can no longer be separated from a set. Singles may be sold only if they were packaged individually. No more splitting that can of Schlitz's off from the plastic sixer ring.
There is a huuuuuuuge catch: according to the report, the new law applies only to new stores looking to sell alcohol and existing shops that want to expand by 100 feet or more. It's been Clockwork's–ahem–experience that single-beer buyers generally stick to long existing stores that haven't expanded since the Truman presidency. And are flush with little paper sacks.
Ah, well, the tighter
restrictions are apparently aimed at reducing public
drunkenness and nuisances . . . associated with stores that have yet-to-open or -expand?
Hmmm, what were they swigging around the council dais when they came up with this one?
Here's something the new law effects: drive-through or walk-up windows that sell booze. Forbidden! Wonder if that will cut into the instances of drunks on foot trying to place orders at the drive-through burger joints?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.