The LCBO strike is behind us. And, as is typical in our era, when every day seems to bring a dozen astonishing breaking-news stories, it already feels like it was a long, long time ago. Something that happened in a different era. This is what happens when reading the news every morning — let alone working in the news business — feels like, as the saying goes, drinking from a firehose.
My mind drifted back to the issue of alcohol in Ontario when this item crossed my computer screen on Thursday. The 7-Eleven chain has announced that, come September 5, its dozens of outlets in Ontario will begin not only selling beer, wine, and pre-mixed beverages (September 5 is the date Ontario set for the expansion of sales to convenience stores), but also giving consumers the chance to drink alcohol onsite (eventually, pending licensing). That struck me as absurd until I thought about it for a minute. 7-Eleven outlets have always been an unusual hybrid of fast-food locations and stores. I pondered the seeming incongruity of having a beer at a 7-Eleven, until I remembered the number of times I’ve seen people standing in one eating a quick meal or drinking a pop or a slushie. The more I thought about it, the less bizarre it seemed. The chain has said that it will be adding small dine-in areas, distinct from the retail area, where open alcohol may be consumed. The usual laws around the sale of alcohol for consumption will apply.
Lest the reader think I’m a kind of 7-Eleven connoisseur, I should add that most of my 7-Eleven trips are behind me. As a university student, there was one just across the street from where I used to park my car before walking what felt like a hundred miles to the actual classroom buildings on the Wilfrid Laurier campus. It wasn’t unusual for me to hit the 7-Eleven for a few essentials or some chips for that night’s Leaf game before heading home after class. I don’t recall ever standing around in one dining on the food offerings, but there was always a crowd of others doing exactly that. It’s not much of a mental leap for me to imagine them doing it today with a beer or cooler in hand. I had a hunch even then that most of the people standing around munching away at the Waterloo 7-Eleven were not entirely sober to begin with.
(For what it’s worth, a quick Google search informs me that the outlet I’m thinking of from 20 years ago still exists. Perhaps my editors will approve a trip. For research purposes.)
Kidding aside, it’s unlikely I’ll ever find myself nursing a beer in an Ontario 7-Eleven; they’re now places I visit only when my kids want to look for some specific candy or weird beverage they learned about via some damned YouTube influencer. But I have no doubt that I, like all Ontarians, will continue to have strange little head-tilting moments as I encounter things that will quickly become routine but will feel strange for those of us who grew up in a very different regulatory environment.
Seeing someone drinking in a 7-Eleven or walking out of my local variety store with a bottle of wine will probably feel exactly the way seeing people openly smoking cannabis felt like for the first few years after legalization. I have a specific memory of standing at an intersection, waiting for a light so I could cross, and noticing two young men standing on the corner passing a joint back and forth. I thought to myself, huh, that’s unusually brazen. And then, seconds later, my brain caught up with reality: it would have been brazen a few years earlier, but that day, it was simply two law-abiding citizens engaging in a legal activity in public. The problem, if “problem” is the term, wasn’t what the men were doing. It was me needing to catch my expectations up with reality.
There are obviously social issues that inevitably accompany alcohol consumption. I am skeptical that the changes in our laws will make our existing problems much worse; access to alcohol in Ontario hasn’t been difficult, per se, so much as at times inconvenient. I don’t think streamlining access for the public at large is going to mean much change in the negative societal consequences of alcohol consumption, and we have laws in place to deal with those already. But, sure, let’s acknowledge openly that there are going to be those who feel that these reforms are a mistake and would disapprove of anyone drinking in a 7-Eleven, just like I’m sure there are those today who still disapprove of smoking cannabis in public, even if it was legally purchased and the user is peaceably minding their own business.
The issue that fascinates me isn’t the legal or regulatory side as much as the cultural. For those readers with a long history in Ontario: think back to what buying beer, wine, and spirits used to be like. I’m not quite old enough to remember when LCBO orders had to be written down and passed like some kind of shameful secret to an employee, who’d retreat to a separate room before returning to hand you your purchase in a paper bag. But I’m certainly old enough to still feel a twinge of novelty when I buy beer at my local Loblaws. And, during the pandemic, when I had a beer delivered to my house with a meal we’d ordered in for the first time, I literally took a picture of it to show my friends.
Guys! Look! I ordered this beer with my nachos, and the Uber Eats guy just gave it to me! It felt like living in the future.
The future is now, I guess. The public will adapt, and it will get harder and harder to resist future reforms. That’s a good thing, in my mind; it will obviously mean other things for LCBO workers, as I’ve warned already. For now, as we wait for September 5, it’s worth taking a moment to just reflect on how much things have changed already — and to wonder how long it will be until it’s hard to remember their ever being any different.
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