Hosting a cocktail week tells you that a city has enough bars, bartenders, and interest to stage one. It does not necessarily tell you how much history the scene has accumulated in its own contemporary-cocktail form. Ulaanbaatar has the former. What it may not yet have is a long internal mythology of its own. The nomadic heritage its bartenders draw on is a living Mongolian inheritance, far older than the cocktail form now using it.

Culture used to form the way a tree grows, one ring at a time, each generation's practice building continuously on the last, until there's enough accumulated material inside the craft itself to draw from. A craft-cocktail scene that’s a decade old, or three years old, may not yet have much history of its own inside the craft itself. So it reaches outside the craft, into practices of hospitality and ingredients that long predate it and remain part of the life around it.

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It’s a familiar move. Milk & Honey, one of the bars that set the template for the modern speakeasy revival, opened in New York on New Year’s Eve 1999 behind an unmarked door, borrowing the atmosphere of Prohibition more than six decades after Prohibition ended. Brewery Ommegang offers the more generous version of the same move: a Belgian-style farmhouse brewery built in Cooperstown in 1996 through an open collaboration with three actual Belgian breweries. The borrowing was explicit and materially connected from day one.2 Templeton is the failure state of the move. A Prohibition-era family recipe and a small Iowa town, until it emerged the whiskey was bulk-sourced from an Indiana distillery. Not the use of a real inheritance, but the claim of one that was not there. The backlash was real enough to end in a class-action settlement.3

Not every attempt to give a new form the depth of an older past gets received the same way. Milk & Honey borrowed so well it went from copying the era to becoming the reference point itself. A speakeasy-style bar opening today is, at least partially, borrowing from Milk & Honey’s 1999 borrowing more than from actual Prohibition. Templeton got the opposite result. Sometimes people notice, and object.

Bekeb, in San Miguel de Allende, is the closer parallel to Ulaanbaatar because it reaches into its own past in the same way. Its menu, built by a Jalisco-native bartender, draws on Mexico's own long herbalism tradition of native roots, cacao flowers, wild agave distillates. It's even named after the Tzotzil word for seed.4 Nobody is reaching for someone else’s past there either. I was at Bekeb two weeks ago, and the menu’s materials and references are unmistakably Mexican, even if they do not all come from the same region or tradition. The staff, unprompted, walks you through the idea as soon as you're seated, ancestral ingredients meeting modern technique. It's in the mural behind the bar, the menu design, the whole space. What's recent is the format, a 50 Best ranking system that's itself less than twenty years old. Bekeb just landed at No. 24 on that list. The ingredients are ancient. The technique is modern.

Ulaanbaatar’s internationally visible cocktail scene is doing the same thing: a recent form of craft interpreting centuries-old traditions.

The organizers made almost exactly this case themselves, in the official recap after the week ended. They didn’t frame it as an import. They called it continuity, hospitality moving from welcoming strangers on the open steppe to welcoming them through a bar door in the city, describing the event as the place “where our heritage meets modern cocktail culture.”5 The organizers do not present this as invention. They present it as one long hospitality tradition taking a new shape. The question is not whether the inheritance is real. It is what a young form does with a past that is.

Maybe culture doesn't have to accumulate slowly anymore, maybe it can be assembled fast and handed a past afterward, and the past doesn't stop being real just because it arrived after the fact. Or maybe most traditions never need this move at all. Given enough time, they form the ordinary way, slowly enough that nobody has to reach back for anything. Borrowed ancestry might just be what happens to the ones that don't get that kind of time to develop their own, domain-specific heritage.

The old version of this process took decades to build and largely happened offline, outside the mainstream. Now it happens in public, in real time. Modern cultural infrastructure can be built faster than cultural memory. What turns a reach back into a tradition isn’t simply time. It’s use, the point where people stop treating an origin story as an explanation. We now refer to the neo-speakeasy aesthetic as simply a cocktail bar. Ulaanbaatar may get there quickly. Or it may keep that centuries-old history visible, and make the visibility itself a permanent part of a new tradition.

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Nochebuena is Christmas Eve, but that translation is not enough. In many U.S. Latino and Hispanic households, it is the main family gathering of the Christmas period: a late meal, music, conversation, prayer or midnight worship, children, relatives arriving in waves and food that carries a family history. It can extend beyond midnight. It can also look …

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I've never missed cigarettes. I smoked for about three months in 2006, working inside sales for big tech while moonlighting as a screenwriter, living alone in California. Quitting was no great loss. But the breaks? The breaks I miss.

This is not an argument for smoking. It is an argument that the cigarette break reveals a social technology: a ritual small enough to be almost invisible, but structured enough to make contact feel permissible.

Cigarettes are having a moment with people in their twenties. We’re seeing more and more celebrity photo edits, not to mention a 70 percent jump in Pinterest searches for “smoking pose” among 18-to-24-year-olds in a single year. Cigarette smoking has been falling for half a century, and the behavioral uptick underneath the aesthetic chase is small, with cigarette initiation among 18-to-25-year-olds rising from about 2.2 percent to 3.2 percent over four years.

Young people are reaching for the image of the cigarette at the exact moment the health case against the behavior has never been more settled. Melissa Little, associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and director of its Center for Nicotine and Tobacco Research, calls it a symbol of pre-digital authenticity, unoptimized and uncurated. Said differently, nicotine itself isn’t necessarily the catalyst for the trend. It’s a hunger for the behavior accessories that used to come along with it: the object in the hand, the smoke-break huddle outside the bar, the ask for a light that has opened a thousand conversations.

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The people most susceptible are the young adults who spent their social apprenticeship indoors. In a longitudinal study of 1,685 students, the ones who started college after the lockdowns scored lower on some social-emotional skills than the first-years just before them. The authors of the study are careful to call the mechanism speculative rather than settled. Separate research on the same age band reports social anxiety tied specifically to delayed social-skill development, concentrated among the students who were youngest when everything closed. The years when you normally build social fluency by repetition, things like the dorm hallway, bad party, or waiting in line at the 18+ club, got compressed for a whole age band at once. A cigarette is a script that requires no fluency. “Got a light” works whether or not you ever learned to open a conversation, because the sequence opens it for you. Handed to people who never got to practice making their own openings, this holds a significant appeal.

A reasonable, surface-level read is that a socially delayed cohort reached for a lost script and the cigarette supplied it. It's probably messier than that. A fashion cycle and a real desire to be around people can look identical. The look fades when the trend moves on. The desire doesn't. The same people will keep trying to recreate what the smoke break gave them: an easy way to stand next to someone and start talking.

We spend an enormous amount of energy on the places where people are supposed to meet. The coffee shop, the corner bar, the plaza, the church basement. Ray Oldenburg called them third places, and a generation of urbanists has been trying to build, fund, and defend them ever since. This instinct is right. A place gives people somewhere to go. But somewhere to go only gets you halfway there. The other half is having something legible to do once you get there, and the smoke break happened to carry both.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the share of Americans who did any socializing on an average day fell from 38 percent in 2015 to 30 percent in 2025, and the time spent on it dropped from 41 minutes to 35. That measure can’t tell you whether the lost contact was in person or online, planned or incidental, and it can’t name a cause. It’s a signal, but it’s also consistent with a world where the casual, unbooked encounter is getting harder to come by.

The usual explanation is that we lost the places. Bars close and congregations shrink. As is often the case, the story is both partly true and incomplete. When two strangers are in the same room, proximity alone doesn’t tell them what to say. A script does. “Got a light” is a script. “What’s your dog’s name” is a script. Buying the next round is a script. Each one is a small, socially understood sequence that answers the questions people are actually stuck on: is it okay to start this, how do I do it without seeming strange, how long am I committed for, and how do I get out without it being awkward.

This isn’t a shortage of desire. In a set of commuter experiments, people told to strike up a conversation with a stranger on the train reported a better ride than the people who kept to themselves, even though most of them predicted the opposite going in. Beforehand, people guessed most strangers wouldn’t want to talk. Nearly everyone who got approached was willing. The desire was there. What was missing, in my estimation, was the permission, and a script is permission that doesn’t require anyone to be brave.

When researchers randomly assigned seatmates across 182 classrooms, sitting next to someone raised the odds of a genuine mutual friendship from about 15 percent to 22 percent. Put people near each other on a repeating basis and ties form. That’s the case for infrastructure and the power of proximity.

Infrastructure decides who will keep running into whom. The script decides whether they can turn those encounters into actually talking, and at what social risk. The cigarette break was potent because it did both at once. It compressed a few people at the doorway, gave them a mutually understood reason to be, put them on the same short clock, handed them an opening object, and built in a clean exit when the cigarette burned down. None of that required liking anyone in advance.

It would be easy to stop at scripts and not places. Both are scarce, and they predict different things, which is the reason to keep them apart. If loneliness were only a places problem, a full venue should produce connection on its own: open the bar, fill the room, and the rest takes care of itself. If it’s also a script problem, a packed room can stay a room of strangers on their phones, each person present and unavailable at the same time. Reopen the third places and watch what happens. Where a shared, low-cost script is already running, the room converts. Where there’s proximity but no script, the crowd stays parallel. A busy coffee shop where nobody speaks and a run club where everybody does are the same infrastructure with different social norms.

This is why the formats that catch on tend to have a script in them. Run clubs, dog parks, climbing gyms, the Tuesday game night. These aren't just new places to go. They're places that come with reasons to speak. The dog is the opening object. The route is the shared clock. The script gets the first conversation; the standing weekly time is what turns it into a friendship. The whole thing is a smoke break with better health outcomes.

We keep answering what is so often a permission problem by building rooms, and then waiting for the rooms to do the talking. The rooms can’t do the talking. What’s actually scarce is cheaper than a building. It’s a shared excuse to begin, an understood way to keep going, and a respectable way to disengage.

The cigarette was one delivery mechanism for that, and a bad one. It was addictive, it was stigmatized for good reason, and it killed people. The obligation isn’t to miss it. The obligation is to notice the work it was doing, and to build something that does the same work without asking anyone to light anything.

Are we running out of places to go or running out of reasons to speak once we get there?

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On paper, America already had a word for this slot on the clock. We called it happy hour. The two occupy almost the same hour and don’t really resemble each other at all once you look closely.

Campari has repeatedly identified Aperol as a major growth engine, particularly in the U.S. on-premise channel. In the first half of 2026, Aperol grew 3.3% globally, while Campari reported continued U.S. momentum and emphasized on-premise performance. IWSR has premium bitters and spirit aperitifs in the US growing about eighteen percent a year from 2018 to 2023, with nineteen percent projected through 2028, and IWSR now flags low-key, spontaneous, early-evening drinking directly as a growth category1.

It isn’t just Aperol either. The Hugo spritz, elderflower liqueur, prosecco, soda, mint and lime, has become genuinely competitive. Even as the specific bottle churns, the category keeps growing. The spritz is generalizing past any one brand.

In my estimation, those numbers matter less than the reservation numbers. OpenTable’s 2026 data has dining between four and five in the afternoon up thirteen percent year over year, and five o’clock reservations in New York up twenty percent. More than half of Gen Z and millennials now say they prefer the earlier seating2. A 2026 Chase Travel called five-thirty the new eight. Is this a net-new consumption occasion for the United States?

Say “let’s get drinks sometime” and you’ve made little more than a nebulous request to reconnect at some point in the future. Bar? Restaurant? Unclear. Say “let’s get dinner” and you’ve asked for real commitment. Say “let’s get aperitivo” and the plan basically makes itself: roughly what time, roughly how long, what kind of place, whether food’s involved and how much you’re on the hook for after. This is a shorthand that solves a coordination problem that I’ve been writing about for the better part of a year.

Happy hour is tied to work. Aperitivo is tied to dinner. That sounds like a small distinction and it isn’t, because the two occasions are really answers to two different questions.

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This essay is about professional wrestling. It is also about fandom, shared fictions, voluntary enchantment, and one of the oldest things humans do together: make something up and decide that it matters.

A few months ago I had a tiger tattooed on my leg. Not a tiger exactly, but the face, or mask of one. It was split between Tiger Mask and Black Tiger, the hero and the villain of a Japanese comic from the 1960s, one gold and one black and silver, near-identical by design because the villain was drawn as the hero’s shadow. Neither is a person, per se. Each is a character a line of real wrestlers has worn in turn, becoming Tiger Mask or Black Tiger for a few years and then handing the mask on.

On Monday I stood in a Brooklyn warehouse with the men who wear both of them now, at what everyone understood was near the end of the current Tiger Mask’s run. I pulled up my shorts to show the current Tiger Mask the ink, and he pointed at it, and we grinned like idiots. I knew the mask was a fiction. I knew the man under it would be replaced. It did not matter, even slightly.

The show was Produce, staged inside Pioneer Works, a former ironworks in Red Hook that is now an art center. A wrestling card inside an art institution, run by people who know exactly what they are doing. The show’s own marketing asked whether wrestlers are athletes or performers and answered that this was the wrong question.

My wife, who is better with people than I am, talked us into the balcony area where the wrestlers prepared as they watched the card from above. It did nothing to siphon the magic. I watched men and women transform into characters, disappear into an elevator then walk out towards the ring and still believed the characters completely.

A fierce sense of belonging runs on a fiction everyone can see straight through. The seeing-through is not a flaw in the love. It is the love.

Culture is less a collection of beliefs than a collection of worlds people agree to keep alive. A fan who knows the match is worked and cries anyway when the old wrestler’s music hits is not a patsy. He is the purest fan alive. There is a line that echoes through pro-wrestling culture, born from a man who had seen through the whole apparatus and refused to let it shrink him: it’s still real to me.

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The business has words for all of it. Kayfabe is the fiction kept up as real. The smart mark is the fan who knows it is a performance and stays anyway. A shoot is the real thing breaking through the worked one; wrestlers will tell you the word comes from carnival shooting galleries with bent sights, though no one can prove it. There is a word for the fiction and a word for the fan who knows and stays. None of this is new.

One of the oldest versions is not nearly as charming. In the Roman arena of the first century, condemned prisoners were dressed as figures out of myth and made to perform the story until it called for a death. The scholar Kathleen Coleman gave the practice a name, the fatal charade. It needed a myth the crowd recognized, and inside the myth the blood was not part of the act.

The Greek word for a stage actor was hypokrites, the answerer. A masked figure in a festival for the god of wine, playing as someone he was not while the audience took him as real. Our word hypocrite comes from it. A memory of something the Greeks knew. That the sanctioned pretender was once a sacred office, not an insult.

Barnum played at something similar in New York in the 1840s. People paid to inspect his Feejee Mermaid, a curiosity most of them doubted, a monkey’s body sewn to a fish’s tail. The doubting was an intentional outcome of the experience. He understood what marketers keep forgetting, that certainty is worth less than suspicion and a crowd would rather catch the seam than be fooled by it. The smart mark did not arrive with the internet. He was already paying at Barnum’s door.

Jesse Cole owns the Savannah Bananas, which is a baseball team the way Produce is a sporting event. The players dance. The stunts are real and the score is hardly the point. There is a rulebook that bans walks and turns a foul ball caught by a fan into an out. Cole, who wears a canary tuxedo and top hat, has read his Barnum and his Disney. He built the whole empire from a blank baseball diamond after studying the ancestors. It works well enough that a ticket-interest list was reported in 2026 at more than four million people. What he is creating is the feeling of being let inside, with baseball as the occasion for it.

A world with its own rules, obviously made up, that you are invited into rather than sold. It’s a withheld thing, with the waitlist, so a ticket means you were chosen. There’s a private language and a growing lore. The audience is elevated beyond spectators to participants, the way a wrestling crowd once chanted a written-off wrestler into the main event. YES! People defend what they help make, in a way that cannot be manufactured.

So the smart mark is not a dupe and not an inspector. He sees the fiction and decides to belong anyway. That decision, made in the open, is an event unto itself.

The internet taught us to prize the authentic thing, the unmasked face and the verified account. But sometimes knowing where the seams are doesn’t diminish a thing. Sometimes it is the price of belonging.

Back to Monday. After Tiger Mask won his tag match, the music changed and Kazuchika Okada, one of the best known professional wrestlers in the world, walked out carrying flowers, to a defeaning roar. He handed them to Tiger Mask and bowed, low and long. Everyone in that converted ironworks knew they were watching a worked show. Everyone also knew the bow was meant to exist outside of the fiction. Or perhaps the bow was part of it too. Most of us had wet eyes anyway.

Nobody was fooled. Everybody stayed.

The seeing-through is not a flaw in the love. It is the love.

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Ask a member of Gen Z whether they like eating alone and you will get a yes. Nearly half do it at least once a week. Ask the same person whether they like sitting at a long communal table, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, and you will get another yes. Ninety percent of them say they enjoy it, versus sixty percent of boomers. One in three has made a friend that way. One in seven has met a date.1

If this sounds a little counter intuitive, I don’t blame you. The most solo diners in the country are also the most communal. They are the same people, on different nights, engaging in opposite experiences. The industry has decided this is a paradox and the word that resolves it is loneliness. The online generation is isolated, the reasoning goes, so it reaches for the communal table the way I reach for coffee on a Monday morning. As a matter of survival.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong about that read, it describes the demand and mistakes it for the mechanism. Loneliness explains why people want company. It does not explain why they will pay a premium to surrender control of the experience. To understand that, we need to look back to the invention of the restaurant and shifts it catalyzed.

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The restaurant began as a way to give diners autonomy over a shared meal. Now, in a world where autonomy is everywhere, premium versions of dining are succeeding by selling the opposite: constraint, fixed timing, forced proximity, and the rare guarantee that an experience will actually happen.

Before the restaurant, eating in public meant the table d’hôte. The host’s table. This was a fixed-price meal served once a day at a set hour at a long communal board where you sat down next to whoever else had paid. No menu, no choice. Miss the hour and you missed the meal. Everything was settled before you arrived, and none of it was settled by you.

The restaurant, when it appeared in Paris in the 1760s, was a machine for taking that apart. Rebecca Spang, a historian of the restaurant’s invention, lays out how gradual the process actually was. She kills the still-repeated myths of the bold restaurateur defying the guilds and the Revolution freeing the chefs. What actually happened was a slow unbundling of the host’s table into discrete elements, sold back to you one at a time. Your own small table. Your own arrival hour. A menu, which is to say a choice.

In many ways, the restaurant was selling autonomy over the meal, in a setting where it had previously been governed by external forces. The shared meal is one of the deepest human social codes. Were we to look back even further, thousands of years, the shared meal has diplomatic, economic, and geopolitical applications. It encodes who eats with whom, in what order, under whose roof. The restaurant took that code and detached it from the household. It allowed you to partake in the full ritual of dinner with anyone, or with no one, on your own terms, in public.

You could sit in a crowded room and be independent inside of it.

This was a genuinely new state of being. The host’s table gave you company with no autonomy. The home gave you autonomy with no company. The restaurant offered a private, self-governing zone set down in a public space. The restaurant’s original innovation was not just food service; it was a new way to package autonomy.

The current American restaurant scene is a far cry from 18th century France. Roughly three-quarters of restaurant traffic no longer takes place in the dining room at all. Takeout and delivery and the drive-thru are becoming the default rather than the exception, and eating at home has stopped being a compromise and become a preference. Delivery alone is a market on its way from thirty-one billion dollars to a projected seventy-four.2

Solo orders now make up almost half of all quick-service business, up from a third a few years ago.3 The people running these companies understand the appeal. In an unpredictable world, one of them says, people are looking for small moments of control, and food is one of the easiest places to get it back. Control your time, control your spend, control your pace, control exactly what and where. A dinner that is entirely yours, governed down to the last variable, eaten whenever and wherever you like, witnessed by no one. Is the snake eating its tail? Perhaps.

The restaurant has succeeded so completely that it has left the room itself behind. The entire surrounding economy now runs on the same promise. Think about remote work, the algorithm that assembles your evening and the single-serving everything. Autonomy stopped being the scarce thing you bought at dinner and became the ambient condition of modern life. Ambient autonomy is the state where opting out is the default setting. Occasions like work, entertainment, and dinner all hand you a frictionless path to staying alone, and you have to work against the grain to choose otherwise. And by you, I mean us. I primarily work from home. I’ve had dinner delivered more than once this week. The private cell is comfortable. That is the problem with it.

The full extension of ambient autonomy has an unanticipated failure mode. When contact is optional, and every other force in your life is pushing you toward the couch and the screen and the order for one, you opt out. Not because you are broken. Because the machine is working exactly as designed. It was built to let you govern yourself, and you are governing yourself, straight into the ground.

Now look at the other pole, the one the loneliness stories are about.

Experiential dining is up forty-six percent year over year. Restaurants are running a third more pop-ups, collaborations, and chef’s tables than before. The communal table, the literal table d’hôte, is back, and Gen Z is driving it. Omakase counters that determine your seat, schedule, and menu, and hand you fifteen courses in an order you do not control. These can run $150 to $250 in the middle of the market and past $450 at the top, with the most expensive seat in the country now asking $1200. Restaurants in more than ten states are locking phones in pouches or bribing them into boxes with free ice cream.

The industry files all of it under the guise of connection and the antidote to loneliness. But these approaches each share something in common. The communal table removes your choice of who you sit next to. The omakase counter removes your choice of what to eat and when the next course lands. The phone-free room removes your ability to dissociate. The pop-up removes tomorrow. Every one of them works by taking a choice away.

It would be easy, and slightly wrong, to call that selling compulsion. Nobody is being compelled. They are paying, at a premium, for constraint, which is different from coercion. Coercion is imposed from outside and resented. Constraint, in this way, is something being intentionally purchased (whether the consumer acknowledges it as such is another story) . The set menu is what lets the meal become an event rather than a decision. The sealed room is what lets the attention hold. The stranger you did not pick is what lets the encounter surprise you. Take the choices away and you are not left with less. You are left with the conditions under which something the diner cannot manufacture alone becomes reliable. Constraint coordinates the interaction. That is the product.

This is the same mechanism that makes a college bar work, and a phone pouch, and a standing Sunday dinner. None of them add freedom. They subtract it, in a controlled way, so that coordination can occur. What the premium tier of the restaurant has discovered is that this subtraction, once the cheapest thing in the world, has become the rarest.

I often find it useful to sort experiences into two piles. The first is nuisances and friction, the things you pay to avoid. The other is the charged and extraordinary, the things you pay to get near. For most of the restaurant’s life, constraint sat in the former pile, lumped together with the other things you aspired to escape. The whole appeal of the unbundled table was that it freed you from the fixed seat, schedule, and assigned neighbor. You left constraint behind.

Constraint now sits in the second pile, with the scarce things worth paying to experience. You can watch the two columns coexist in a single dining room. A restaurateur with a twenty-seat communal table describes an older customer who booked it by accident, sat down, and left a furious review about being “forced” to sit there. Three seats down, a twenty-four-year-old is describing the identical arrangement as the best part of the night. Same arrangement, opposite columns, sorted by generation. I hesitate to file this away as a paradox. It’s more of a real time shift in behavioral thresholds, perhaps even an inversion. We just happen to be paying attention.

What the industry did next is the oldest move it has. Once the involuntary became scarce and charged, it built a gate and attached a fee. The free, ambient places that used to impose contact for nothing, the parish hall, the union local, the corner where you had no choice but to see your neighbors, were zoned and priced and dissolved out of American life decades ago. The premium counter rushes into that vacuum and sells the same forced proximity back, timed, plated, at four hundred and fifty a seat. One of the designers building these rooms gives the game away in an interview: the communal table, he notes, “is incredibly efficient and profitable.” We paid, over two centuries, to take the constraint apart. We are now paying considerably more to have it back.

An institution appears to solve a scarcity. The restaurant solved a scarcity of autonomy in a culture oversupplied with obligation. And it succeeded so thoroughly that it ultimately evolved into the opposite scarcity. Autonomy went ambient as obligation went scarce. And the institution, rather than declining, began selling the very thing it was built to alleviate, at a markup, to the descendants of those who paid to escape it.

This is not the typical observation that markets chase scarcity. It is a scarcity of conditions, not goods. And these conditions used to be “free” because they were imposed. Show up when you’re told. Sit where we tell you. Eat what we’re serving. Do it all in full public view. Modernity’s great project was making all of that optional. Its unpriced consequence is that the obligation is now the rarest commodity we have, and the newest frontier of the market is selling it back to us as a luxury: the conditions we used to have no choice about, restored on demand, for a fee.

The restaurant just happens to be where you can see it most clearly. Once, in 1760, for the right to govern your own dinner. And now, at the counter down the street, for the right to hand that authority back to a chef who will not let you choose, beside a stranger, which turns out, after all this time, to be the thing worth the most.

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Stand in a bar tonight, around ten, when the room has filled but before it gets loud. Look at the regulars. The couple who orders without looking at the menu. The guy who tips like he has a crush on the bartender. And maybe he does.

In three years, every one of them will be gone. Not most. All.

The staff goes too. The bartender who knows every regular’s drink, the bar-back who turned out to be the best hire you ever made. Eighteen months, give or take, and you are training their replacements. Maybe a general manager continues on. Maybe.

The reputation survives. It transmits through older siblings and orientation week, describing a place they’ve yet to enter, built by a staff no longer employed here. There is no grace period. A crowd shows up the first Thursday of September holding an expectation earned years ago, and you have to live up to it, with a bartender who started six weeks back.

Let’s be honest about this bar’s prospects. Primed for a solid decade? Or is it a bar you would describe, if a friend called about buying it, as a problem? It reads as a disaster.

It is also a description of one of the healthiest categories of bar in America, and some of the spots it describes have been the best bar on campus for decades.

Wednesday night I was in a car in New Orleans headed uptown to The Boot, which sits at the edge of Tulane, has served that campus for decades, and is a LineLeap partner. Halfway there, someone said the obvious thing.

They’re closed.

Of course they were. It was July. Nobody was on campus, and there was no reason on earth for that bar to be open. The closed door was not a sign of trouble but a sign that the operation understands its own business perfectly.

Bars do not close for July. Restaurants do not close for July. Hotels, breweries, taprooms, none of them go dark for a season because the customers are elsewhere. The college bar runs on an academic calendar rather than a city’s, and that alone separates it from every other venue category in the country.

I spent last week at Tales of the Cocktail. Craft bars, well represented. Dives, hotel programs, restaurants, neighborhood joints, all present and accounted for. College bars were not in the conversation. Not criticized, not defended. Absent.

The economics explain most of it, and to be fair, they explain it well. A cocktail built to the standard being discussed at Tales costs what it costs. Time, technique, ingredients, a bartender with the training to execute it consistently at ten o'clock on a Saturday. That drink lands somewhere north of fifteen dollars in most American cities, and it should. The people making it have spent years learning how.

A college bar operates under a ceiling set by what a twenty-two-year-old can spend on Thursday and still go out Saturday. That is not a preference or positioning choice. It’s math. You can put a fifteen-dollar cocktail on the menu, and some do, but you cannot build a business around it and still have a college bar.

So the craft conversation and the college bar have little to say to each other about drinks. I am not going to pretend a spec-driven program is secretly the answer for a room holding four hundred people on a Thursday.

But drinks are not the only thing an industry knows how to talk about.

Total customer replacement every three or four years. The entire book of business, turning over, continuously, forever. Staff replacement every eighteen months, because the staff comes from the same population as the customers. Juniors become seniors and seniors leave.

A reputation that persists without most of the people who built it. The name gets strangers through the door on the strength of what somebody’s older sister said. Then it has to be true that night, executed by a crew that mostly was not there the last time it was earned.

Any operator in another segment facing one of these would call it a crisis. Facing all three, consistently and permanently, they would sell the building.

But the good college bars just do it. They open in August, train the new crop, pack the house, hold the standard, and stay the best bar in town while the entire campus rotates beneath them. Some have been doing it since before their current customers were born.

That is not luck, and it is not the RTDs being cold. That is an operating system.

My job at LineLeap gives me a view into how this happens. Training built on the assumption that the trainer leaves. Standards written to transmit in days rather than months. Service design that survives volume without collapsing.

These operators worked it out over years, sometimes decades without trade coverage and conference panels. They did it without anyone from the broader industry asking how they did it, in a segment the rest of hospitality regards, when it regards it at all, as the place where people drink badly before they learn to drink well. That’s a shame.

Tales, Bar Convent, any conference with a stage should put college bar operators on it. Not a novelty panel about the youth market. An operations and training track, taught by the people who solved the hardest continuity problem in American hospitality because they had no choice.

The craft world spent twenty-five years professionalizing technique and did a remarkable job. It has spent far less time professionalizing the transmission of technique through an organization that turns over completely and repeatedly.

It runs both ways. The craft world could take batching and speed under load from them. The college bar could take a two-ingredient house drink made the same way every time by a nineteen-year-old with six weeks in. Their worlds are not as mutually exclusive as either side believes.

For a great many Americans, the college bar is the first bar. Not the first place they drank. The first place they drank in public, among strangers, with a bartender and a tab and a set of norms they had to learn by watching. It’s where a person finds out what a bar is for. Whether it is a place you go to get obliterated or a place you go to see people. Whether the bartender is a vending machine or someone who might remember you and, heaven forbid, educate you.

The industry has spent years in an increasingly frantic conversation about whether young people will show up. Meanwhile the venue category built entirely around young people showing up is not a part of the conversation.

I do not think that is snobbery. The institutions of this industry were built around a different kind of bar, and the college bar does not fit the shape of them: wrong price point, wrong season, wrong reputation, wrong everything except the part where it works.

The Boot opens when Tulane does. The room fills. Nobody in it will know that an industry spent a week two miles away discussing the future of drinking without mentioning them, and it will not matter, because the operators have a more pressing problem: a few thousand people are about to walk in for the first and need a reason to come back.

They will have solved it by September. They solve it every year.

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I experienced the particular deja vu of someone who has read a sentence before. Not a sentence like it. The sentence. I went to my files, and by files I mean the neverending list of reports and articles forwarded to my Kindle library, and there it was: last year, the same research firm, announcing that Gen Z was NOT the generation of moderation, survey reveals. I had quoted that one myself in a December essay. And the December essay had a predecessor, a satire I published in September of 2025, in which I catalogued the contradictory Gen Z drinking headlines of the preceding eighteen months and concluded that we had produced a generation existing in a quantum state, simultaneously sober and increasingly drunk, depending on which study one believed and which week one believed it.

So the narrative has now been debunked at least twice, conclusively, by the same outfit. One begins to suspect that “conclusively” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

I have spent a not insignificant amount of time tracking the question of what young people are doing with alcohol. I sit inside a company with visibility into hundreds of bars in college markets. I read the syndicated reports, I attend the summits. And my honest, considered, expert conclusion is this: I don’t know. Neither, I will argue, has anyone ever known, going back at least fifty years, and the industry has survived and occasionally thrived anyway. That may be the most hopeful turn of phrase I’ve written all year.

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The Press Release That Argues With Itself

The headline finding is that 74 percent of legal-drinking-age Gen Z consumers across fifteen markets now drink alcohol, roughly level with the adult average of 76 percent, and up meaningfully from 66 percent three years ago. From this, the debunking. Gen Z drinks like everyone else. The moderation story is dead. Someone tell the seltzer people. So goes the verdict, anyway.

Keep reading. The same survey reports that drinks per occasion have fallen to 3.9, down from 4.4 the prior two years. It reports that choosing to drink less has become the default position of the majority of drinkers in every market surveyed. It describes the downward trend in total volume as structural rather than cyclical.

These numbers do not contradict the participation numbers. Two discordant things can be true at once and often are. In this instance: more young adults drinking at least occasionally, while drinking less per occasion, inside a world drinking less overall. A cohort can show up at the party and still nurse one drink. That is not a paradox. The finding is genuinely interesting and suggests the moderation story did not die so much as it grew up. It got more complicated. The quarrel is between the data and the verdict attached to it, because “more complicated” is precisely the one thing a conclusive headline has no way to say.

And then there is the matter of the Boomers, who in this release are crowned the true generation of moderation, on the strength of a two-point decline in participation and the fewest drinks per occasion of any cohort. The firm’s own spokesperson notes that this is typical of consumers reaching their sixties and seventies. So the most surprising claim in the release, the twist that earned the headlines, is that people in their seventies drink less than they used to. My parents recently moved into a not-quite retirement community twenty minutes away, which has given me ample access to Boomers. I have checked with several people in their seventies about this finding. They were not surprised.

Now, before anyone mistakes this for a takedown of the researchers: I believe the data. Knowing whether a person of legal drinking age consumed alcohol at some point in the past six months is real and useful. And in fairness, the body of the release mostly trades in nuance. It states findings, it hedges the Boomer trend with an “if this continues,” it stays in the present tense where it belongs.

The trouble is that one, rather prominent, word in the framing. A generational narrative, fairly or not, becomes a statement about trajectory. Can we truly define a trajectory as conclusively anything on the strength of a six-month recall question? “Debunked” invites the reader to believe the question is closed. The reader, who is hurriedly reading this headline over morning coffee, hears a forecast. The firm articulated a moment; the machine will convert it into a destiny by Friday, and everyone in the chain will be able to say, truthfully, that they never quite made the prediction themselves.

The conclusiveness is not an accident. A finding that says young adults are participating somewhat more than three years ago, inside a broader structural moderation, does not transmit well across an industry favoring bold proclamations over nuance. A finding that says a generational myth has been destroyed is in every trade outlet within a day. Headlines are how a data firm reminds the market that it exists, because the market rewards firms that do. I am part of the market being reminded. I quoted this same firm’s numbers last December when they served my argument, and I will quote them again, probably soon. We built a machine that pays a premium for conclusiveness and it would be strange to act surprised when the conclusions arrive on schedule.

The Groundhog

Punxsutawney Phil has been predicting the weather since 1887, and by the most generous accounting he is right about as often as a flipped coin. This has damaged his standing not at all. Every February, tens of thousands of people travel to a small town in western Pennsylvania to watch men in top hats consult a rodent, and every February the verdict is carried by national news organizations with a mock sincerity that never quite makes its way into a correction.

Phil endures because Phil was never in the forecasting business. He is in the ritual business. The ceremony gathers a community. It produces a shared story at a moment when people are cold and looking forward to a distraction. Nobody in Punxsutawney believes a groundhog governs meteorology, and the town loves him anyway, correctly, because the prediction is the excuse and the gathering is the product.

Our industry has its Gobbler’s Knobs, and I mean this with affection, because I attend them; I stood in one this past January and watched brands lift their new products from the stump while a few hundred of us synchronized our view of the year ahead. A fragmented industry needs a shared story to plan against, the way farming towns needed an almanac even when the almanac was half folklore. The fact that everyone receives it together is more important than the actual content of the announcement.

The trouble comes from how the ideas transmute. A reading of the moment leaves the Knob, travels from a press release to a trade headline to a strategy deck to a LinkedIn consensus, and somewhere along the way it stops being a photograph of this July and starts being treated as a forecast of the next decades.

We Have Never Known Anything

People in this industry have always been able to read the present; a glut is visible from the warehouse window, and today’s moderation is visible from any bar. What we have never been able to do is forecast what a generation’s relationship with alcohol becomes over decades. Was there some golden age of cohort foresight from which we have fallen? Reader, there was not.

Start in 1970, the year bourbon hit its all-time peak, roughly eighty million cases. The industry looked at the Baby Boomers coming of age, the largest generation in American history, raised in whiskey-drinking households, and made the reasonable forecast: more of the same, forever. The Boomers arrived and ordered vodka. Producers treated the dip as a blip and kept distilling into it, and by 1980 Kentucky was making under a million barrels a year while sitting on five times that much aging in warehouses. Distilleries went dark for eighteen months at a stretch, lit up for three, went dark again. A category’s fortunes are not the same thing as a cohort’s behavior, but the bourbon bust was a cohort miss at its core: an entire generation that was forecast to drink like its fathers declined instead.

Bill Samuels of Maker’s Mark was standing with another distiller when a funeral procession went by, and the other man remarked, “There goes another one of our customers.” This makes my narrow point better than I can. These men were not failing to read the present. They read it perfectly; they could joke about it at the curb. The failure was that the forecast outranked the observation. The industry saw its customer aging out with its own eyes, and kept distilling anyway, because a belief about the future had been granted more authority than the funeral going by in plain view. That is the whole pathology in one scene: the eyes work fine, and the groundhog outvotes them.

In an effort to ensure consistency, the industry was just as wrong about the recovery. Nobody forecast the bourbon renaissance. It was largely improvised. Struggling brands got shipped to Japan, where mature American whiskey unexpectedly found an audience that treated the glut’s neglected barrels as treasure. Single barrel bottlings and small batch lines began, in the 1980s, substantially as ways to move excess aged inventory, and only later became the premiumization playbook that every brand recited as gospel until it became heresy over the last year or so. The bottles that sat unsellable in that era now command thousands at auction. The forecast missed in both directions, catastrophically, and the correction came from bartenders, importers, and inventory managers making it up as they went.

Wine ran the same script with my generation. Through the 2010s the industry’s leading annual report warned, year after year, that Millennials were not embracing wine as had been predicted. By early 2022 The New York Times was carrying the warning of a coming day of reckoning: Boomers aging out, Millennials declining to step in, doom penciled in on the calendar. Then this past December, the Wine Market Council’s benchmark study found that Millennials had surpassed Boomers as the country’s largest wine-drinking cohort, that Gen Z’s share had climbed even though half of them can’t legally drink yet, and that the largest erosion in wine drinking was among consumers over sixty.

Read that again. Young cohort doing fine. Boomers declining. It is the identical narrative structure as this week’s release, published seven months earlier, about a different category, from a different research body. The machine prints this exact story on a schedule now. The generation that was killing wine is currently saving it (or at least no longer killing it), per the same research apparatus that certified the killing, and one waits with some professional curiosity to see who will be certified as killing it next.

A whiskey historian named Charles Cowdery made an observation a while back that I should probably print out and pin to the wall behind my desk. “The word ‘cyclical’ trips easily off the tongue, but the American distilled spirits business has never been normal. A pattern must repeat at least twice to be considered a cycle and that’s never happened with beverage alcohol in the U.S.” It’s worth looking beyond the pull quote and reading the full piece in Whisky Advocate. After all, a piece about unverified claims traveling warrants its own chain of custody.

Prohibition, war rationing, the glut, the renaissance, the seltzer eruption. Every era was a one-off. This does not mean analysis is futile; reading the present carefully is real work that produces real knowledge, and it is the work the good analysts, this week’s survey included, actually do. It means the success of the specific activity of extrapolating a cohort’s future from its present is nil, and the industry’s record at it is fifty years of improvisation, narrated afterward as foresight.

So What Do We Actually Know?

You may have noticed that the previous section carried the title “We Have Never Known Anything,” which is exactly the kind of conclusive overstatement I have spent this essay complaining about, and which I then spent the section’s first paragraph walking back. I could have softened it but alas, the headline writer lives in all of us. If a man writing 2,500 words against inflated conclusions cannot get through his own subheaders without falling victim to the pull, one can extend some sympathy to a research firm with a marketing department.

Last September, I offered the complete list of what we know for certain: Gen Z exists, alcohol exists, and some members of Gen Z sometimes consume alcohol. Ten months later I can afford to be slightly more generous.

We know participation and volume are different instruments measuring different things. A 24-year-old who says yes to a survey and buys four drinks a month is not lying to anyone; she is early in her career, renting, and not yet hosting the dinners where consumption compounds. We know, from Gallup, that the share of adults under 35 who drink at all declined about ten points over two decades, and we know, from this week’s release, that participation among the youngest legal drinkers has climbed since 2023. Both can be true. Cohorts are less mountains and more tectonic plates.

What we do not know is what Gen Z’s relationship with alcohol looks like in 2036, or 2046. Nobody knows. The people who told you the Boomers would drink brown forever were wrong. The people who told you the Millennials would never buy wine were wrong. The people who told you Gen Z was the sober generation are being ritually debunked. Every prior generation, at exactly this life stage, was confidently forecast in the wrong direction, sometimes in both wrong directions within a decade. The single most accurate sentence available on the subject is that Gen Z’s drinking future has not happened yet.

I am a millennial, which means Groundhog Day transcends metaphor; it is a movie I have absorbed through repetition and there’s probably some meta joke to be made that I lack the wit to identify at this moment. The most useful lesson we can take is from the escape. Phil Connors does not get out of the loop by finally predicting the day correctly. He knows every event before it happens on that day for a good chunk of the film and it avails him nothing. He gets out when he stops trying to force outcomes and begins to pay attention to, and eventually appreciate, the people and events around him. How breaking Samsara of him.

New Orleans

On Sunday I board a plane for my first Tales of the Cocktail, the opposite pole from the forecast ritual. Tales began in 2002 as a walking tour of New Orleans cocktail bars and has grown into a week where the global bar community takes over the French Quarter. Keynotes and prognostications fall away in favor of rooms full of people who served the consumer of last night and will serve the consumer of tomorrow night; a sort of knowledge no syndicated survey can access.

I’ll do my best to appreciate the madness and not try to force outcomes.

I will permit myself exactly one prediction. At some point next week, probably Wednesday, probably at a bar, someone will tell me that Gen Z is drinking again. They will have read it somewhere. And it will be conclusive.

See you in New Orleans.

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If you want to know what the alcohol industry is going to look like in ten years, you shouldn’t be looking at other consumer packaged goods. You shouldn’t be looking at the snack aisle or the beauty counter or the energy drink cooler.

You should be looking at the American church.

Specifically, you should look at the panic that set into American Protestantism about twenty years ago, and the massive, expensive, well-intentioned mistakes they made trying to fix it. Because the beverage alcohol industry is about to make the exact same mistakes, for the exact same reasons.

Both organized religion and the alcohol industry are institutions that historically relied on ambient, habitual participation. For generations, you didn’t have to market church attendance or bar attendance. They were just the default social infrastructure of adult life. You turned 21, you went to bars. You had kids, you went to church. This is exactly what Robert Putnam was talking about in Bowling Alone. The participation was structural, not just individual.

And then, for both institutions, the structure collapsed.

According to Gallup, in the year 2000, 42 percent of Americans attended religious services almost every week. Today, that number sits around 30 percent. Among young adults, it’s closer to 22 percent.

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The alcohol industry is staring down a very similar cliff. We talk about Gen Z moderating and the rise of GLP-1s. There’s the growing substitution economy. But the true bellwether is the same one the churches saw: frequency. The habitual, low-stakes, ambient visits are vanishing.

When the church realized young people were leaving, they panicked. And their response was to try and be cool.

This birthed the “seeker-sensitive” movement. The logic was simple: if young people aren’t coming to traditional church, the traditional church must be the problem. So they gutted it. Out went the liturgy, the stained glass, the hymnals, and the theological depth. In came the rock bands, the smoke machines, the coffee shops in the lobby, and the TED-talk style sermons. They tried to compete with the entertainment industry on the entertainment industry’s terms.

They engineered the friction out of the experience. They made it accessible. They made it premium. They eventized it.

And it largely failed.

The writer Dan Foster documented one version of this up close: a church that gutted its basement, brought in pool tables and an Xbox and a commissioned mural, papered the local high school with flyers, and built the kind of space that looked, on paper, like exactly what teenagers wanted. Almost none of them came. The failure wasn’t a marketing problem. Teenagers could tell, instantly, that the room had been built to be liked by them, and that recognition was enough to keep them out.

But more fundamentally, it failed because it misunderstood what people actually wanted. Young people weren’t leaving the church because the music was too old or the lighting was bad. They were leaving because the institution felt inauthentic and disconnected from their actual lives. When the church tried to act like a rock concert, it just looked like a bad rock concert.

And ironically, the young people who are returning to religion today are often seeking out the most traditional, high-friction, demanding forms of it.

They are looking for the Latin Mass, or simply for more Mass. Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate found that Gen Z Catholics now attend Mass at least monthly at a higher rate than Baby Boomers or Gen X, 39 percent to 35 and 30. The specific form matters less than the fact that the plain, unglamorous version, kneeling, a homily, no fog machine, is the one pulling them back in. They want something that asks something of them.

The same split is happening in my own tradition, and it’s not subtle. Reform and Conservative synagogues, the movements that spent decades removing friction, shorter services, English liturgy, and Bar Mitzvah lessons scheduled around soccer practice, are the ones losing young people fastest. Orthodox communities, the ones that ask the most of you: keeping kosher in a world that doesn’t, observing a full day of rest every single week, praying in a language most people had to be taught, are growing, and getting younger while they do it.

The only other Jewish institution that’s growing is Chabad, and it works on the opposite logic entirely. No membership required. No dues. And, in theory, if not always in practice, no judgment about what you do or don’t believe. Show up as you are. The rabbi knows your name before you know why you keep coming back. Chabad doesn’t remove friction by lowering the standard. It removes friction by refusing to make you prove yourself at the onset.

Those are the two models seeing growth. Everything in between is contracting.

Nobody joins an Orthodox shul because it’s convenient. They join, or stay, because the demands are the point. My grandparents’ generation fought hard to make Judaism easier to carry into an assimilated American life. Their grandchildren, it turns out, prefer it heavy.

The alcohol industry is currently in its seeker-sensitive phase.

We are looking at the decline in ambient drinking and we are panicking. And our response is to try and be cool. We are eventizing everything. We are building “experiences” and “activations.” In making the lighting more Instagram-friendly and the branding more lifestyle-adjacent, the industry is trying to make the bar compete with the internet on the internet’s terms.

Not all friction is the same friction. The industry’s mistake is treating it as one undifferentiated obstacle to remove. There’s ritual cost: showing up on the same night, being known by the bartender. This is a repetition that builds identity over time. And there’s access cost: door lists and nineteen-dollar cocktails. Ritual cost is what makes a regular. Access cost just makes people look elsewhere. The seeker-sensitive church didn’t fail because it removed access cost. It failed because in removing access cost, it also accidentally removed ritual cost, and mistook one for the other.

The bar, like the church, is a piece of social infrastructure. Its value runs deeper than the liquid in the glass, the same way the church’s value was never really about the coffee in the lobby. The friction itself isn’t the value, though. It’s a symptom. What it protects is something closer to standing: the suspension of who you are outside the room in favor of who you are inside it. The eighteenth-century coffeehouse wasn’t valuable because it was hard to get to. It was valuable because rank didn’t matter once you were in the door. When the bar or the church becomes frictionless, it isn’t just losing inconvenience. It’s losing a neutral ground where you don’t have to perform your job title or your net worth.

When we try to turn the bar into a frictionless content studio, we turn it into a bad version of the internet.

If the alcohol industry wants to survive the collapse of ambient participation, it needs to look at what is actually working in the religious world. It isn’t the megachurches with the fog machines. It’s the small, high-friction, demanding communities that offer genuine connection and a break from the optimized, frictionless modern world.

Look beyond the silliness of the name regularmaxxing and focus on the yearning driving that behavior. People don’t need another highly curated, premium lifestyle experience. They have enough of those on their phones. What they need is a place to be a regular. They need a place that requires them to show up, to know the bartender’s name, and to participate in the messy, unoptimized reality of physical community.

We don’t need seeker-sensitive bars. We need places that are confident enough to just be bars.

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A main character, in that original sense, is the person a story cannot run without. Take them out and there’s no story left, just a setting where one used to happen. Most people, including most people who would correctly say they have main character energy, are not that. They’re memorable. They may even be central to a few scenes. But they don’t drive the plot.

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Mark tends bar at my neighborhood go-to restaurant, the Whitlock. He knows my order, my name, my daughter’s name. He’s my bartender, and a good one at that. None of that makes him a main character. If anything, his preternatural awareness of when to lean into a conversation and when to gracefully move down the bar is exactly what a good supporting player does. He’s not the lynchpin. While his absence would be felt, the Whitlock will still be the Whitlock without Mark behind the bar. I don’t think he’d argue that.

What’s actually rare isn’t being known, or even being loved. It’s being the one person a place cannot survive without, who defines the place rather than staffs it. A bar can have several bartenders the regulars genuinely love and still only ever have one or two who are, in this specific sense, irreplaceable.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales opens at a real inn, the Tabard, where a chance gathering of strangers turns into the entire frame of the book because the innkeeper proposes a storytelling contest, agrees to judge it, and decides to come along. Chaucer calls him simply “the Host” for most of the prologue. We only learn his name, Harry Bailly, much later, almost as an afterthought.

Bailly turns out to be real, incidentally: town records put a Henry Bailly in Southwark as the local tax collector in the years before the Peasants’ Revolt, the same neighborhood, the same period. Chaucer didn’t invent the idea. He watched a man already doing it and wrote it down.

Six hundred years later, the writers behind Cheers did the same thing with a little less ceremony. The exterior shot is a real Boston bar, the Bull & Finch, and the bartenders the show’s creators spent time inform who Sam Malone actually is underneath the baseball backstory. Even Rick’s café in Casablanca has a paper trail, a Manhattan nightclub impresario named Billy Rose fused with a Paris bar the screenwriter actually sat in before the war. Neither was invented from nothing.

Memorable bartenders, it should be said, aren’t rare in fiction. Every decade produces a few vivid, quotable ones. Moe Szyslak is one, a real Jersey City bar owner named Louis Deutsch folded into a cartoon, famous for exactly nothing except being unforgettable for the five minutes he’s on screen. What’s rare is a bartender the story can’t survive without. Sam Malone is that. Take him out of Cheers and there’s no show left.

Donohue’s on Lexington Avenue had one. Maureen Donohue-Peters. Her restaurant closed a few weeks ago, and it would have been easy to tell the version of this story that everyone tells about New York these days: rent went up, another institution dies, somebody mourns a checkerboard tablecloth in a comment section of a paywalled article. That’s not what happened.

Defying expectations, her landlord, David Berger, offered to lower the rent when she told him she was leaving. She’s going anyway, after seventy-six years, not because the city pushed her out but because she’s ready for what comes next. Not retirement, but a more deliberately paced life in Westhampton Beach, where her other restaurant, Donohue’s East, already is.

A regular named Robert Ellsworth ate at Donohue’s seven nights a week for decades, an Asian art collector worth nearly two hundred million dollars who never once learned her last name. When he died in 2014, his will left her fifty thousand dollars, and rather than guess at a surname he’d never asked for, his lawyers just wrote down how he knew her. His will calls her Maureen at Donohue’s. Berger put it more plainly when reporters called him this week: the first thing people ask is whether Maureen will be there, “because she is the restaurant.”

This makes the actual anomaly at Donohue’s far more interesting to me than the rent narrative. The standard story needs a villain, a landlord, a crime wave, a lease nobody could afford. This one doesn’t have one. Berger wanted her to stay. The neighborhood wanted her to stay. By her own account, she still loves the work. None of that mattered, because a restaurant that runs on one irreplaceable person doesn’t get a vote when that person decides the chapter is finished.

It doesn’t usually end this gently. Toots Shor’s restaurant collapsed under tax debt in 1971, and when his name was later sold off and licensed to a small chain of bars that had nothing to do with him, nobody was fooled. The sportswriter Red Smith wrote that there was never a gathering place like it and never would be again. Decades later, in a brownstone on Restaurant Row that had stood since 1925, Barbetta closed within six weeks of its owner’s death. Laura Maioglio had run the place since 1962, a hundred and twenty years of family ownership, and there was no one left who was Barbetta the way she had been.

Once in a while, someone tries to rescue the person instead of the building. A bar called Lucy’s, named for the woman who ran it, got evicted in 2024. It came back the following spring because someone else paid to bring it back, specifically so Lucy, eighty-four years old, would have somewhere to keep tending it.

Elaine Kaufman ran a similar experiment, in reverse. Her longtime manager inherited everything when Kaufman died, the lease, the staff, the regulars, the name on the awning, and closed it five months later anyway, because, as she put it, there was no Elaine’s without Elaine. And there’s no Donohue’s without Maureen.

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Two things came to mind. This night is a lot of fun. And, it doesn’t exist without the World Cup.

I don’t mean the obvious point that nobody’s going to throw a watch party for a game that isn’t on. I mean something more specific.

Most of this group had gotten together the previous week at a Mexican restaurant to watch Mexico’s opening match against South Africa. Now, if I’m being honest, a group of highly social, and socially active, suburban Latinas form the connective tissue of this social circle and a handful of them probably would have found a reason to be out that night anyway.

But this Thursday, at a house, with two cultures represented and kids up past ten and soju on the table alongside tequila, required a different level of event. A Mexico friendly in March doesn’t do it. A World Cup match in the group stage, with something real at stake, does.

The occasion didn’t just increase the volume of alcohol consumption. It helped determine the form the night took.

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The off-premise data from the week ending June 14 confirmed what anyone at a watch party already knew. Circana had beer dollars flipping to +0.1% after two straight weeks negative. Modelo up 4.7%. But the numbers further down the list were more interesting: Pacifico +28.2%, Victoria +29.0%. BeerBoard tracked on-premise draft revenue up 16.84% year-over-year for opening weekend, packaged revenue up 24.6%.

Constellation (owner of Modelo, Pacifico, and Victoria) will look at those numbers and call it a World Cup win. Maybe it is. But there’s a question that the data can’t answer: did those brand marketing and advertising (either in the short term, or like in the case of Modelo, over year of reinforcing it’s messaging) earn those sales, or did the occasion hand them over? Was the Pacifico already in the host’s fridge, bought on a regular grocery run weeks ago? Or did they specifically pick it up because Mexico was playing and Pacifico felt appropriate for the night?

I genuinely don’t know. I didn’t ask.

What I can tell you is what I saw at the table. The Mexican beer selection wasn’t random, and it wasn’t purely brand loyalty in the conventional sense. Modelo is what you reach for because it’s the most legible Mexican beer in the American market, the one that crosses over, the one most non-Mexicans know. Victoria is what someone’s family drinks. Pacifico is what that person’s brother drinks because he thinks Modelo has gotten too big, too mainstream, too removed from what it used to mean. These are not the same choice. They are three different relationships with a level of Mexican identity expressed through adjacent products, made possible because the World Cup created a night where all three of them belonged on the same table.

The soju was both cultural and a gesture. Someone brought it because Koreans drink soju, and also because bringing it was a way of acknowledging who else was in the room. The occasion made that acknowledgment feel natural.

Constellation has spent a long time marketing Modelo, Victoria, and Pacifico into Mexican-American identity. I don’t mean to dismiss that work. But a sales forecast is a lot like a weather forecast. You can read the conditions, position yourself in the right markets, make sure you’re in the fridge when the surge comes. But when it does, it doesn’t fall evenly. Pacifico’s +28% reflects both years of brand building and favorable conditions at the right moment. From a sales report alone, you can’t fully separate what was earned from what was given.

A late 2025 BCG survey of nearly 2,800 consumers found occasion to be the most powerful driver of what people select when they drink. Distributors in a recent Jefferies survey cited occasion-based marketing as a top priority. The industry knows occasions matter. How much of what looks like brand success is just good timing?

Beer was down around 4% year-over-year in the four weeks ending June 13, per NIQ. The World Cup flipped the two-week trend positive. TD Cowen attributed roughly 110 basis points of improvement to the tournament. That improvement was real, and it will probably persist through July.

Then the tournament ends. The next Mexico match, whenever it is, will be a friendly. The table won’t look the same.

I was at the watch party. I saw the soju and the Pacifico and the kids who should have been asleep. The night was real, the drinking was real, and the brands on the table got there through some combination of cultural work, marketing investment, and weather. I can’t tell you the proportions. Neither can they. They’ll take the credit, which is reasonable. But the storm did a lot of the work, and in four weeks it’ll be over, and we’ll see what a Thursday looks like without it.

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He wasn’t looking for permission to drink again. He was looking for an explanation. So he called me - obviously.

The framework I gave him was costly signaling: the evolutionary mechanism by which humans build trust through shared vulnerability. The logic runs roughly like this. Trust is a fundamental problem for social animals. How do you know, genuinely, who’s on your side?

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One answer is shared risk. When you drink with someone, you lower your guard in public, in front of them, in a way that’s at least mildly consequential. You’re saying, implicitly, that you trust them enough to be that version of yourself. Drinking with someone is a low-stakes version of the same logic that drives initiation rituals and synchronized physical risk. The group coheres. It's not a metaphor. It's observable across cultures and contexts.

The other piece was simpler. Alcohol is called a social lubricant like it’s a polite figure of speech, but the description is more functional. It creates the conditions for conversations that wouldn’t otherwise occur. The spontaneous overshare. The two-hour tangent. The thing you say to someone at 11pm that you’d never say over coffee.

Alcohol itself isn’t the only way to create these dynamics. Cultures that don’t drink have other rituals that serve the same function. Think shared meals, tea ceremonies, communal prayer, music and dance. Non-alcoholic options have made real progress on the ritual front. But they’re a workaround, not a replacement. Part of what makes drinking a trust-building mechanism is the small cost involved: you’re lowering your inhibitions, making yourself slightly vulnerable in front of another person. That’s the cost that makes the signal honest.

The piece ran in GQ in January. His individual experience maps almost exactly onto a growing, and unexpected, trend.

A report from The New Consumer found that wearable users drink more on average than non-users. Based on everything we know about the cult of wellness and optimization, that doesn’t compute. Wearables are supposed to raise health consciousness and reduce bad behaviors, right? Instead, it seems the people most fluent in the language of optimization are also the people most willing to make deliberate exceptions to it.

More broadly, according to Gallup, 53% of Americans now believe moderate drinking is bad for their health. That number has roughly doubled since 2016. The moral consensus shifted faster in a decade than it had in the previous generation. Yet fewer than half of the people who told the New Consumer survey that drinking was unhealthy said they planned to cut back.

The generation most often cited as alcohol’s existential threat deserves a closer look. More than 40% of Gen Z hasn’t reached legal drinking age. A significant share had the social formation years, the college bar, the house party, the post-work drink that teaches you how to be a colleague, interrupted by COVID. A record number of 25-to-34-year-olds still live at home, an environment that structurally suppresses drinking occasions regardless of what anyone thinks about WHO guidelines. Pull those variables out of the trend line and the generational signal gets appreciably quieter.

What did shift is the story people tell themselves about what they’re doing when they drink. That’s not nothing. Cultural permission structures matter. But there’s a meaningful difference between a population that stopped drinking and a population that started feeling guilty about it.

The wellness movement that produced this guilt operated on a particular set of assumptions: that health is primarily a biological project, that the body is an optimization problem, and that alcohol is an obvious variable to minimize. What that framework excluded was anything that doesn’t show up on a recovery score. Connection. Trust. The spontaneous conversation that doesn’t happen on a schedule. The GQ writer called these “the best parts of life.” Some anthropologists would take it a step further, calling them something closer to the foundation of social cohesion.

The alcohol industry defended itself on biological terms for two decades and consistently lost. The Surgeon General linked alcohol to cancer. The WHO declared no amount safe. Those arguments are not going away. The defense that was always available, and mostly unused, was sociological: that the ritual of drinking together produces something real, that the social utility of alcohol is observable and documented, and that the decision to drink is also, always, a decision about the kind of life you want to be living.

Whether the industry is capable of making that argument credibly is a separate question. What the data suggests is that consumers are already making it for themselves. The wearable users who drink more than average aren’t confused. They’re running a different equation. A life fully optimized against risk turns out to be a risk itself.

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The thing about pools is that some people want a drink. What they don’t want is the glass, the opener, the mixer, the second trip inside, or the preemptive anxiety of ending someone else’s swim due to a bloody foot. For most of American drinking culture, there was no complete solution. Cans solved the glass problem but weren’t cocktails. A flask was discreet but required you to have made the drink yourself. Boxed wine solved volume but not portion control, or a higher proof. You assembled some combination of compromises and hoped for the best.

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Merrilee Kick was grading papers by a pool in Texas in 2009 when she had the same thought. She went looking for a single-serve cocktail she could bring outside without glass, sealed, complete, nothing extra required. She couldn’t find it. So she mortgaged her ranch, apparently using her cows as loan collateral, and built it. As one ought to do.

That’s BuzzBallz. A round plastic container roughly the size of a tennis ball at 15 to 20 percent ABV. It’ll run you three to five dollars. It has been sitting in gas station coolers for fifteen years while most of the beverage industry looked at it and saw a novelty. An unserious one at that. What Kick had actually built was a solution to a problem so obvious that nobody had thought to name it.

The problem is friction, which in this case means something lived rather than theoretical. You know it. It’s that beach where you forgot to bring the mixers. The graduation party at a venue that technically prohibits outside alcohol and practically doesn’t care. The neighborhood pool where someone always brings wine in glass and someone always regrets it.

Let’s pause to acknowledge that pools are one of the more contested settings for drinking in the first place, given supervision, safety, and the younger demographic usually within splashing distance. That’s a different kind of friction. It’s social rather than logistical and BuzzBallz doesn’t resolve it. No container design makes day-drinking around other people’s kids less of a delicate affair. It solves for the physical mess and hazard of glass. The social tension stays exactly where it was.

Clayton Christensen spent a career making the case that consumers don’t buy products. They hire them to do a job. BuzzBallz was hired for jobs the rest of the then nascent RTD category wasn’t applying for. Looking back, the other, more on trend brands, like Tip Top and On The Rocks were competing to be the best version of a familiar drinking occasion while BuzzBallz was solving occasions seemingly too low brow to warrant attention.

The industry missed this partly out of snobbery, which incidentally can manifest more as a perceptual filter than a personality flaw. Premiumization had become the only story worth telling, and a product that announced itself as cheap, plastic, and unserious was easy to underestimate. The trade press kept reading the wrong signals, price point, novelty shape, joke flavor names, because those were the only signals its own hierarchy had trained it to read.

By every agreed-upon marker of category prestige, it wasn’t worth covering. The trade press was writing about premiumization and the craft cocktail migration while BuzzBallz was compounding. By the time Sazerac acquired it in 2024, it was generating a reported $500 million in annual revenue.

More than half of BuzzBallz buyers are women. Yes, the product has a genuine Gen Z following, replete with TikToks and punctuated with a consumer-named drinking ritual. Passionate as that following may be, and they are genuine brand fanatics, the volume was never coming from there. It was coming from a woman buying a four-pack at Kroger because it was the right amount of drink for the occasion she actually had in mind. The same woman Kick was when she started the company. The industry spent fifteen years chasing a premium consumer and left this one largely uncontested. It tends to do that.

But the demographic data matters less than what it reflects: the people doing the most practical thinking about how drinking actually works in daily life were not the ones writing the trend reports and innovation strategies. That says something about the industry. It says something larger about us.

Informal public gathering spaces are the connective tissue of a functioning democracy. The bar on the corner offered neutral ground. A chance to meet the stranger and have the conversation you didn’t plan. Same with the barbershop and the union hall. Not many BuzzBallz floating around those spots.

The stadium is full of strangers. So is the beach. But notice what BuzzBallz actually replaces there: the walk to the concession stand, the line, the small unavoidable exchange with the person selling you a beer. That interaction wasn’t much, but it was something, a brief, mandatory contact with another person in a public space. Bring your own sealed drink and you’ve proactively sorted yourself out of the collective and into your own biodome. You can stand in a crowd of forty thousand people and need exactly none of them.

That's civic neglect. And before you dismiss it as hyperbole, ask yourself when checking the news stopped being a habit and started being a source of anxiety. I can’t think that far back.

BuzzBallz didn’t cause this. But it arrived perfectly calibrated to a moment dominated by first place energy. Whether that makes it a solution or an accommodation is a question the $500 million acquisition doesn’t answer.

Kick figured out the logistics on a lawn chair in Texas. The industry caught up in 2024. The larger question is still open. And as for me? Well, that’s simple. I’m looking forward to a summer free of broken glass.

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My birthday is December 24th. Christmas Eve. The night most of America is otherwise occupied.

I turned 21 at a sushi restaurant on Long Island with a handful of Jewish friends who had nowhere else to be. We did sake bombs until the kitchen closed early, then moved the party to someone’s driveway with a twelve-pack.

The Stone Balloon — the college bar where this was supposed to happen, where the bartender was supposed to hand me a birthday shot while Mr. Green Genes, an east coast cover band known for playing bar circuits in New Jersey and Delaware, played Mr. Brightside to a room full of strangers who half-cheered — probably sat empty. I’ll never know. The University of Delaware was on break and I was home for the holidays.

The Stone Balloon is gone now. Demolished in 2006 and replaced by condos and progress. So the version of that night I never had is doubly gone: the bar doesn’t exist, and I was never the right age at the right time to be inside it anyway.

I understood, even at the time, that I missed a significant ritual. Not just a night at the bar, but a known and followed script. That thing people mean when they say they “finally” did something, like crossing a threshold.

Now I’m left wondering whether the ritual of the 21st birthday is getting heavier, not lighter.

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The data is not subtle. A 2008 University of Missouri study of 2,518 college students found that 83% reported drinking to celebrate turning 21. Of those who drank, 12% reported consuming exactly 21 drinks. About half exceeded their previous lifetime maximum in a single night. Separate research from the Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors puts the average BAC on a 21st birthday celebration at .186. That’s more than twice the legal limit for driving.

This is not a story about heavy drinking in college. Heavy drinking in college is ordinary. The 21st birthday is something researchers who study event-specific drinking consistently find in its own category. The evening features higher consumption, higher BAC, and is more likely to exceed prior personal records than New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, or spring break.

The ritual has a name, merchandise, and a script. Shot books. Sashes. “Finally Legal” balloons. Pub crawl packages with VIP entry and a dedicated host. The commercial infrastructure is not incidental.

The anthropological term is rite of passage. Before midnight: legally excluded. The night itself: liminal, excessive, witnessed, documented. After: incorporated. You can walk into a bar and order something. The 21st birthday fits that structure almost perfectly — which raises a question about what’s happening to all the other structures.

The 21st birthday is an immovable liminal moment. Everything around it is untethered.

In 1975, 45% of Americans between 25 and 34 had hit all four traditional markers of adulthood: left home, entered the workforce, married, had children. By 2024, fewer than one in four had done the same. Adulthood used to arrive as a cluster of events that created multiple occasions to mark the transition publicly. Now those events arrive separately, if at all, at different ages, sometimes not at all.

The 21st birthday remains a crisp legal threshold, externally validated, commercially legible, tied to a product category that knows how to throw a party. In a culture where most markers of adulthood have become gradual and private and reversible, this is rare.

How did I know what I was missing? Not from having done it, but from understanding culturally what it was supposed to feel like. That pre-knowledge is part of the ritual too. You anticipate the threshold before you cross it. When I didn’t cross it, I felt the absence specifically, not just generically.

The Last Rite, incidentally, sounds like a pretty good cocktail. Something bitter, something sweet, something you order once and remember.1

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In 2009, Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dobkin published a paper that should have embarrassed a lot of marketing departments. Using death records, they showed that mortality from alcohol-related causes spikes at age 21. A threshold is crossed and something activates.

The strategic question the data raises is where, exactly, that window opens. I’m not suggesting people suddenly start drinking at age 21. Many were already drinking. Legal access changes the quantity, the context, and the occasion in a way that’s measurable in mortality data.

College bars aggregate newly legal drinkers at a density that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. They’re also social environments, which matters for spirits specifically. Spirits in on-premise settings get ordered in rounds, built into cocktails, poured as shots at tables. The category benefits from the mechanics of group drinking in a way that a liquor store purchase or a six-pack in a dorm room does not.

According to a Spotify data analysis, music experienced at ages 13-16 for boys, 11-14 for girls, is the strongest predictor of adult music taste. A 2021 NBER working paper looked at how craft beer preferences formed among Millennials and found that local craft-beer availability when consumers reached legal buying age predicted their beer preferences later in life. What you drank in your early legal years left a mark on what you reached for at 30. The paper is about beer, not spirits, but it’s my take that the findings are transferable across categories.

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The spirits brands that have convinced themselves the college consumer isn’t worth prioritizing tend to run two arguments. The first is economic: the consumer has low discretionary income and the brand is premium. The math doesn’t work. The second is temporal: the consumer will grow into the category on their own. Taste develops, income grows, and premium spirits are there waiting on the other side of that arc. Just be present at the right moment further downstream, and the consumer will come to you. The NBER data says otherwise. The brand that’s waiting downstream is competing against whatever got there first.

A $14 cocktail and a $6 shot can contain the same liquid. The question is whether the brand has thought about how it shows up in an environment where the $14 version won’t move.

I spent time with Pete Sorrentino, one of the owners of Bullwinkle’s, a go-to bar in Lawrence serving KU LDA students. Green Tea is his top selling shot. Among the LineLeap audience, it was the most ordered shot at 20%. No brand owns it. Pete told me that the espresso martini shot, made with well spirits, also sells. Spirits brands have spent real money building the espresso martini as a cocktail occasion. The shot version of the same drink in a completely different environment, reaching a desired consumer at a price point that can be made to work. Nobody owns that either.

A LineLeap survey found that tequila and vodka together account for roughly a third of users’ favorite shots. No tequila brand showed up more than once in unaided recall. Tito’s was the only vodka named at any volume. Brand names don’t show up as part of the memory.

The growth of alcohol sponsorships in college sports is probably the industry’s half-answer to this problem. Get the brand in front of the consumer before the window opens legally, build some association, hope it carries through. It doesn’t, but it’s a rational bet. It’s also a different bet than being in the room at the moment when legal access actually changes behavior. The Carpenter and Dobkin data is about what happens at 21, not what happens at 19 in a basketball arena.

Age 21 is a threshold, not a window. Consumers cross it once. Most brands aren’t there when they do.

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That dynamic runs well beyond Marvel. Across industries that share almost nothing structurally, the same pattern has settled in: stronger peaks and hollowed-out baselines. The result is revenue and attention concentrating into fewer, higher-intensity occasions while the habitual, low-stakes transaction that used to sustain the whole system erodes. Only we didn’t notice until it was already gone.

Alcohol is my primary lane and it’s where you can measure the erosion precisely. And the measurement is uncomfortable.

INRIX tracks traffic patterns across American cities. Their 2024 data turned up something the category should be looking at more carefully than it is.

Weekday evening downtown trips fell roughly 9 percent compared to 2019. Weekend evening downtown trips rose. Saturday nights were up 12.5 percent year over year. Sunday evenings up 12.7. The midweek social clock that organized happy hour, the after-work drink, the ambient Tuesday bar visit, weakened. The weekend event clock held and then some.

The occasions that survive are the ones with a reason behind them. The ones that didn’t require a reason are gone.

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What the Baseline Was Doing

I’ve written at length about what the Gallup numbers show, so I won’t retread it here. The short version: fewer Americans drinking, and the ones who are drinking are doing so less often. Frequency collapse, not category exodus. Active drinkers reported 2.8 drinks in the past week. Down from 3.8 the year before. Lowest since 1996. A casual night that used to happen without planning now happens less often, or not at all.

What matters is what that casual night was actually producing, because it wasn’t just producing revenue.

Ray Oldenburg called the spaces that hosted ambient social life “third places,” distinct from home and work, where community sustained itself through regular, informal contact. The economic model of those spaces depended on consistent baseline traffic. But baseline traffic was also doing something harder to measure: it was generating the repeated, low-stakes interactions through which social cohesion accumulates.

Randall Collins spent decades working out the mechanics of this. His argument, developed in his work on interaction ritual chains, is that the felt sense of social belonging builds through repeated, regular contact. Each successful interaction adds to a cumulative reserve. Each lapsed habit draws it down. The mechanism is specific: when you stop going to the bar on Tuesdays, that slot in your interaction chain goes dark. The social energy that would have accumulated there doesn’t get made somewhere else. It simply doesn’t get made. A high-intensity event can generate a burst of that energy, but a burst doesn’t substitute for a chain.

Émile Durkheim called the energy produced by shared ritual “collective effervescence,” the heightened sense of meaning that emerges when people gather, synchronize, and participate in something together. The Super Bowl watch party produces it. The concert produces it. The birthday dinner produces it.

But Durkheim’s theory contains a warning that tends to get lost in the application: effervescence derives its meaning from being embedded in a larger pattern of regular communal life. The annual festival punctuates a year of ordinary gathering. When the ordinary gathering disappears, the festival becomes spectacle.

The Spike Economy

The retail sector learned what happens when you optimize away the baseline. The logic went like this: instead of maintaining steady demand through consistent pricing and routine transactions, concentrate your marketing energy into promotional events. Black Friday. Prime Day. End-of-season clearances. The spikes drove enormous volume and generated compelling quarterly narratives.

The problem was the feedback loop. When spikes become the primary demand driver, consumers learn to wait for them. Why buy at baseline when the spike is coming? The baseline hollows out. The next spike has to be bigger to generate the same revenue. Promotional dependency sets in. The category starts to feel like it only exists at peaks.

On-premise alcohol has been running a version of this cycle. The industry didn’t engineer it deliberately the way retailers did. But the structural result is similar. As ambient occasions eroded, the category’s cultural and commercial energy concentrated into events. St. Patrick’s Day. The Super Bowl. Music festivals. Destination dinners. The World Cup this summer. These occasions still work. But the data from the ones that have already happened is instructive.

St. Patrick’s Day 2026 was the clearest recent confirmation. BeerBoard tracked draft beer volumes up 4 percent across the total holiday period compared to 2025. Draft revenues fell 4 percent over the same period. The industry’s highest-intent beer holiday produced more beer drunk at lower value. Volume without value is a different problem than volume decline, and in some ways a harder one. It means the spike is drawing down on what’s left of consumer spending capacity without rebuilding the habit that would produce the next purchase.

What Eventized Drinking Can Actually Do

Live Nation reported 159 million fans across 55,000 shows in 2025. Two Circles estimated U.S. sports events drew 292 million attendees in 2024, up 3 percent year over year. Eventbrite’s Social Study found 79 percent of 18-to-35-year-olds planned to attend more events in 2026. Nearly nine in ten young adults said in-person experiences matter more to them than digital ones. People have not lost the desire to gather. They’ve lost the ambient infrastructure that made gathering automatic. What remains is a different kind of social energy: concentrated, intentional, episodic.

Inside the category, DISCUS reported that cocktails and RTDs grew 17 percent in volume and 16.5 percent in revenue in 2024, adding $468 million. That growth is real. The formats winning it are the ones that reduce friction at the moment an occasion is already in motion. RTDs don’t create occasions. They protect the ones that survive long enough to generate a purchase. They are optimized for a world where the occasion itself is already fragile. Low-friction and easy to integrate into fragmented plans, RTDs succeed because they attach themselves to social energy generated elsewhere.

That’s a genuinely useful function. It’s also a different function than what the ambient base was performing, which was generating occasions without anyone scheduling them.

Strip the RTD growth out and DISCUS’s own numbers show spirits revenue fell 2.6 percent and volume fell 3.0 percent in 2024. Circana found that 49 percent of Americans were trying to drink less in 2025. More than a third described alcohol as a treat or luxury rather than a regular expense. When something moves from default to treat, it can still thrive in moments reserved for treats. It loses the everyday assumption that made it large. And the everyday assumption is what’s gone.

Revenue can hold steady for years while the participation architecture underneath quietly deteriorates. Premiumization, RTDs, and event spikes can preserve dollars longer than they preserve frequency. That’s the danger in citing category stabilization in a vacuum.

As casual, ambient activities weaken, surviving occasions absorb more emotional and commercial weight. The fewer nights people go out, the more pressure each night has to justify itself. This is part of why concerts, festivals, tentpole films, and destination dining increasingly feel culturally oversized relative to the past.

Why Concentration Isn’t Replacement

The argument for eventized drinking as a category offset tends to run on revenue math. A $19 cocktail at a concert offsets several cheap beers in value terms. Premium occasions generate better margins than routine ones. Fewer visits at higher spend per occasion can look like stability in the aggregate.

The math isn’t wrong. It just answers a different question than the one that matters structurally.

Ambient drinking was high-frequency by design. It attached itself to existing rhythms and required no activation energy. The after-work drink happened because people were already leaving the same building at the same time. The neighborhood bar worked because the neighborhood provided temporal synchronization and spatial concentration for free. Nobody had to engineer the occasion. The conditions produced it.

Eventized drinking requires clearing more hurdles. The occasion has to be scheduled. The group has to coordinate. The night has to feel worth the money, the transit, and the recovery time. Every one of those requirements is a filter that removes some fraction of potential occasions before anyone opens anything. The coordination cost is real, and it compounds across the week. Which is why Gallup’s active drinkers are at 2.8 drinks per week instead of 3.8, and why the INRIX data shows the midweek social clock has gone quiet while weekend evenings spike.

A high-intensity event generates effervescence in the moment. It doesn’t rebuild the interaction chain that ambient occasions were maintaining. The Doomsday opening weekend produces collective effervescence for people who may not have shared a single low-stakes interaction in months. The experience is real. The accumulation isn’t happening.

Whether the spike economy drove this erosion or whether it’s the monetization response to a baseline that was already collapsing is hard to disentangle cleanly. The forces that make consumers defer low-stakes outings—cost pressure, schedule fragmentation, infinite at-home alternatives—also reduce in-person contact frequency.

In practice the dynamics reinforce each other. American adults spend more than 20 percent less time with others in person than they did 20 years ago, per the American Time Use Survey. The Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023.

Proof Points

The Loneliness Epidemic Is a Drinking Problem

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory declaring loneliness a public health epidemic. Two years later, Gallup reported that the share of Americans who drink alcohol had fallen to 54%, the lowest figure in nearly 90 years of tracking and one point below the previous record set in 1958…

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4 months ago · Ben Tannenbaum

Why hasn’t some version of high-frequency, high-intensity social life developed natively in this eventized economy, generating its own chain structure through repeated event attendance rather than casual bar visits? I tend to believe that such a social system cannot overcome the absence of contrast between the casual and premium and Collins would agree. Within this framework is the idea that humans do not socialize because of innate biology. We do so because we are, as he put it, emotional energy seekers. When casual spaces disappear, human socialization breaks down too. It shouldn’t be too surprising that we are lonelier than ever.

The alcohol industry and those writing about it, myself included, can get hung up on the binary of abstinence versus indulgence. A more useful lens would be frequency collapse versus occasion concentration.

Eventized drinking is a concentration engine. It captures what remains of alcohol-linked social energy and compresses it into fewer, more intentional, higher-salience occasions. That compression can support strong revenue headlines, premium pricing, packed venues, and brand excitement in the channels where it concentrates.

A margin story and a volume story are not the same story, and the alcohol industry has been telling the first one while the second becomes the defining plot twist. The baseline hollows out. The spikes have to get bigger. The next occasion has to justify itself more explicitly than the last one did.

The World Cup and the summer holiday stack will produce volume with a story attached. Fine. The ambient, mundane weeknight is the only number that tells you whether the structural condition has changed. Either people go out or they don’t. Right now they mostly don’t.

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“The medium is what happens to you, and that is the message.”

Marshall McLuhan, 1966

As far as I can tell, Marshall McLuhan never wrote about bars. He wrote about television, radio, electric light, and the phonetic alphabet. But buried inside his framework is as precise an explanation for what’s happening to on-premise than anything produced by the three-tier system in the last decade.

The insight is simple, and it’s a phrase everyone misremembers. The medium is the message. Not the drink. Not the occasion. Not the brand. The medium.

McLuhan meant that the form of a communication technology shapes human behavior more the content it carries. Television didn’t matter because of what was on television. It mattered because of what it did to the human nervous system, to family arrangement, to the rhythm of evenings. The content was incidental. The medium was the intervention.

Translate that to beverage alcohol, and the bar was never primarily about the drink. It was about what the bar did as a medium: it synchronized large numbers of people in physical space on a predictable schedule, lowered the planning cost of social contact to near zero, granted social permission for behavior that required explicit negotiation everywhere else, and made the accidental encounter structurally inevitable. The drink was the content. The bar was the medium. And the medium was the message.

This is why so much of the industry’s diagnostic work has been wrong. The category has spent enormous energy interrogating the content, the what-people-are-drinking question, while the medium itself has been coming apart. Tracking spirits share versus beer share, or seltzers versus RTDs, is the equivalent of debating network programming while the television set disappears from the living room. A more important question is not which content is winning inside the channel, but whether the channel is still capable of producing the social behavior the category depends on.

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Hot and Cool

Another useful McLuhan concept is the distinction between hot and cool media. A hot medium is high definition. It delivers information with clarity and completeness, leaving little for the audience to fill in. A cool medium is low definition. It requires participation; the audience completes the experience through their own engagement.

Film is hot. The telephone is cool. A photograph is hot. A cartoon is cool. The higher the resolution, the less the audience has to do, and therefore the less they are implicated in the experience.

On-premise occasions map onto this axis with uncomfortable precision.

The ambient bar night is a cool medium. It’s low resolution. You don’t know who you’ll talk to, what will happen, or what the evening will become. The incompleteness is the point. Because you have to participate in constructing the experience, you are more deeply embedded in it. The social bonds formed in low-resolution environments are stronger because they required something from you. The accidental conversation, the stranger who becomes a regular, the night that became a story: these are functions of a cool medium operating normally.

The eventized occasion is a hot medium. It delivers high-definition experience: curated playlist, branded activation, bottle service with sparklers, a specific start and end time. Everything is resolved in advance. The guest doesn’t have to fill in anything. And the social outcome reflects that. People attend together, experience together, and leave together, their pre-existing relationships confirmed and their network unchanged.

The industry has spent fifteen years building hotter and hotter media while wondering why the emotional resonance keeps declining. The answer is in McLuhan. You can’t manufacture belonging through high-definition delivery. It requires participation.

The reason low-resolution environments produce stronger attachment is that people partially create the experience themselves. Participation creates ownership. Ownership creates memory. Memory creates attachment.

The Village That Wasn’t

In 1962, McLuhan predicted that electronic media would compress the world into a “global village,” restoring the tight social bonds of pre-industrial community through the intimacy of broadcast connection. He was right about the compression and wrong about the village.

What digital connectivity actually produced was hyperconnected isolation. Everyone accessible, no one present. Weak ties multiplied and ambient bonds collapsed. The infrastructure that had once generated community by accident, by proximity, by repetition, did not migrate to digital formats. It evaporated.

The alcohol industry absorbed this as a distribution problem. If people aren’t in bars, reach them through e-commerce. If they’re drinking at home, build DTC. If they’re on their phones, buy mobile impressions. The medium shift was treated as a logistics challenge rather than a structural rupture.

McLuhan’s framework suggests the rupture is categorical, not solvable by finding new pipes. The bar worked as a social technology because it was a cool medium that required human physical participation to function. No digital format replicates that. A Discord server is not a bar. An Instagram activation is not a bar. A virtual happy hour was, briefly, a category-defining example of a cool medium’s failure to survive format translation.

Digital mediums reorganized attention, scheduling, and social permission around the bar. They did not replace it. That means the problem is not only where drinking happens, but when and how social life gets synchronized in the first place.

What This Means for Beverage Alcohol

If the bar is a medium and the medium is degrading, the question for alcohol suppliers isn’t what content to put through a failing pipe. It’s what the next medium looks like, and whether it’s possible to attach to one.

This reframes several problems at once.

It reframes the occasion architecture conversation. The collapse of ambient occasions isn’t a preference shift. It’s a medium going offline. The Five Conditions I’ve written about here before, temporal synchronization, spatial concentration, low planning cost, social permission, and repetition, are, in McLuhan’s terms, the technical specifications of the bar as a medium. Remove any one of them and the medium stops transmitting.

That is why “more occasions” is not the same thing as “healthier occasions.” A venue can be busy and still fail as a medium if the conditions that create participation have eroded.

It reframes the brand relevance question. If the medium is the message, then the brands most associated with cool media occasions carry cultural weight that high-definition activations cannot replicate. Being the beer of the Tuesday night regular carries more social meaning than being the official spirit of a stadium experience, even if the stadium numbers are larger. One is content in a cool medium. The other is content in a hot one. The first implicates the consumer in the experience. The second delivers to them.

It reframes the on-premise investment question. Suppliers who treat on-premise as a small sampling channel or a velocity metric because it’s less than 10% of their sales are using hot-media logic: deliver the content, measure the output. Suppliers who treat on-premise as the medium itself, and invest accordingly in the conditions that keep it functioning, are seeing the operating system, not just the apps running on top of it.

The bar that stays open, stays affordable, stays embedded in neighborhood rhythms, is preserving a transmission infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt once it’s gone. I made a version of this argument in “The Illusion of Stabilization” and the underlying logic holds here: the numbers that look stable are masking a structural condition that isn’t.

McLuhan died in 1980, before smartphones, before Uber, before the night out became a planning event rather than a default. But his framework holds. What the industry is watching is not a consumer preference shift. It is a medium going dark. And unlike content, media don’t come back once the infrastructure that carried them is gone.

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It was. Whoopi Goldberg gave it to them when they opened.

I asked Lauren McLaughlin, who has been behind the bar there since the beginning. She told me part of the story. I figured out the rest this morning, a decade or more after I first walked in.

I’m in my early forties. I probably shouldn’t know what the Stork Club is, right?

I graduated college in 2005, spent two years in LA, and moved back to New York still figuring out what kind of New Yorker I wanted to be. I grew up on Long Island, so “the city,” as we bridge and tunnel folk call it, wasn’t foreign to me, but living there was different. You had to decide what version of it you wanted.

Part of my answer involved a blazer and a tie I rarely had occasions to wear. Thankfully, there was Restaurant Week at the 21 Club once a year, which was the only way I could afford it. It offered me an occasion to wear that blazer, still a requirement for entry at the time. It felt like cosplay, but I came to understand it wasn’t.

The 21 Club was a museum of itself by then, a relic, and I loved it for exactly that reason. The Pegu Club and Flatiron Lounge were constants for me. Mad Men was everywhere. A Continuous Lean, Michael Williams’s menswear blog about heritage and considered things, was a bible of sorts. Rittenhouse rye was getting hard to find, though I couldn’t have told you why. I just knew bartenders wanted it and that when you could get it the Old Fashioned tasted different.

For many of us, there was a sensibility in the air at that moment. A return to things that were made carefully, worn deliberately, drunk properly. I was too young to articulate any of it. I just knew I was drawn to places and objects that felt like they had been somewhere before I got there. Places that seemed, perhaps, anachronistic and were better for it.

I absorbed the Stork Club somewhere in all of that. Osmosis, mostly. Then I read Ralph Blumenthal’s book about it in 2009 and the osmosis became something more like understanding.

Which is why, a few years later, I stopped mid-sip when I saw the ashtray.

Why did Whoopi Goldberg have a Stork Club ashtray to give anyone? She had finished narrating a documentary about Walter Winchell, the radio gossip columnist who ran American celebrity culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. He had fifty million listeners at his peak. Publicists lined up outside trying to get their clients into his column. The kind of man who could end a career before you finished your drink. His office was Table 50 at the Stork Club. The ashtray came from that room. Whoopi spent months living inside that world and when Fresh Kills opened she gave them the thing she had.

Winchell to Whoopi to Williamsburg. The object traveled.

My grandfather was a Toots Shor’s man. He knew Bernard “Toots” Shor personally, which sounds like old man mythology until you understood who he actually knew.

There’s a family story. Maybe lore is more appropriate. Late 1950s, sometime before 1961. My grandfather, my father, and Art Modell are in what passed for a luxury box at the Polo Grounds, watching the Giants play the Cleveland Browns. My father was maybe twelve. At some point Modell turns to my Dad and says, “Larry, I think I’m going to buy that team.”

Bullshit, right?

Art Modell bought the Cleveland Browns in 1961. He moved them to Baltimore in 1996, renamed them the Ravens, and won the Super Bowl five years later. My grandfather received a personal fax thanking him for his support. The kid who heard that comment at the Polo Grounds was in his fifties by then. We still have the fax. Real enough.

My grandfather wasn’t much of a drinker, more of a cigar guy, but he was in those rooms. The Stork Club came up when I asked him about his spots. Different crowd than Toots Shor’s, he said. Toots was athletes and sportswriters and guys who knew guys. My grandfather knew guys. The Stork Club was the Hollywood people, the gossip column set, Winchell’s table.

My grandfather died in 2016. The Stork Club closed in 1965. Winchell is gone. Toots Shor’s is a midtown office building. But the ashtray was at Fresh Kills Bar, and Lauren knew exactly where it came from, and I know because I sat down one night and asked.

Lauren doesn’t remember that conversation. Why would she? I never forgot it. I’ve been back plenty of times since, different nights, different occasions, different people across the bar. The ashtray was always there at the end. Until it wasn’t.

I reached out to Lauren before I published this. The ashtray isn’t there anymore. Richie, the owner, took it home. People kept trying to steal it.

Which tells you something. Enough people sat at that bar, saw that object, felt whatever I felt, and wanted to take it with them. Or maybe they were just drunk.

The photo of the original owner. The house rules placard. And sometimes, if you're lucky, a vintage Stork Club ashtray.

Go to the bar. Be whatever version of yourself you want to be, but go to the bar.

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That version is on the state historic marker. The truth is slightly more complicated.

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Self-serve grocery experiments were operating in Walla Walla in 1913, Tucson in 1914, and across California by 1915. What Saunders actually did was file the patents, build the chain, and scale the concept nationally until it became the only logic anyone could see. By 1922, there were 1,300 Piggly Wiggly locations. He standardized the business model.

In the context of beverage alcohol, shelves reinforced and operationalized pre‑existing trade and tax category structures. At some point the logic became invisible and nobody thought to ask whether the shelf was describing how people shop or just describing how companies organized their floors.

My last piece argued that the consumer is a context: the same person running different decision logic in different moments. The corollary is simpler. The shelf was built for a person who doesn’t exist.

Proof Points

The Consumer Is a Context

It’s December 1975 and a young assistant professor of marketing at Temple University has just published an eight-page paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. Russell Belk’s argument was simple enough to fit in a single sentence: situational variables (where you are, who you’re with, what time it is, your mood walking in the door, which Belk called an…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Ben Tannenbaum

Shelves Follow Systems; Occasions Follow People

IWSR’s Bevtrac research, conducted across 15 key markets in September 2025, found that the average number of beverage alcohol categories consumed per occasion fell, while single-category occasions rose. Among younger cohorts, the compression is sharper: Gen Z and Millennial consumers moved from 2.8 categories per occasion to 1.8 over the same period. Richard Halstead, COO Consumer Research at IWSR, described what that means for competition: “The reduction in volume and multi-category usage at an occasion will serve to increase competition for that ‘first drink,’ which might be the only drink of the night.”

That sentence contains the problem. The shelf organized commerce around categories competing with other categories. IWSR is describing is a world where the average number of categories per occasion is falling and single‑category occasions are rising. This suggests sharper competition for that “first drink,” which may be the only drink of the night.

The shelf could not see this coming because the shelf was never measuring it. Category management, as NielsenIQ defines it, is a shared process for managing categories as strategic business units, with tactics built around assortment, price, promotion, and shelf-space optimization. That system works at organizing supply. It was never designed to map the consumer’s actual decision logic.

The measurement asymmetry this creates is structural. Brown-Forman’s investor materials split performance into portfolio clusters: the Jack Daniel’s family of brands, tequila, RTD, by region. Constellation reports Beer and Wine & Spirits as separate segments with separate operating margins. Diageo breaks growth narratives into category buckets and geographies. These structures make category performance highly legible and cross-category occasion substitution nearly invisible. A brand team can track exactly how Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey is performing against competitive whiskeys. It has far weaker visibility into how many occasions that used to call for a whiskey are now calling for a THC seltzer, a CBD water, or nothing at all. Brands use basket and occasion research, but in a way that’s embedded in core P&L/category structures.

NielsenIQ reported in April 2026 that THC beverages reached $239 million in the latest 52 weeks, growing 135% year over year, with 50% of U.S. adults expressing interest in trying cannabis-infused beverages. NIQ framed it directly: “Suppliers and retailers need to understand where these products fit within consumer repertoires and occasions.” The category management question for alcohol is which aisle THC belongs on. The consumer’s question is simpler. What do I want to feel like tonight, and what’s the easiest path there?

That question does not begin and end in the alcohol aisle.

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What Aisle Is Celsius On?

Celsius is a cleaner illustration of what occasion escape looks like from the inside. At CAGNY in February 2026, Celsius described its category transformation in explicit terms: energy had moved from “a narrow transactional category driven by impulse purchases” to “a lifestyle-driven one,” with usage spreading across dayparts, trip types, and consumers who weren’t previously energy drink users. Celsius’s own data showed 33% of consumers drinking it as a social drink, 37% consuming it with a meal.

A reported CAGNY transcript further quotes management describing expansion into “the social gathering segment amid declining alcohol consumption.” Celsius doesn’t live in the energy drink aisle in the consumer’s mind. It lives in the pre-social energy occasion, and in that occasion it can compete with a shot of espresso, a beer, and the decision to stay home. The syndicated data measuring Celsius’s share of the energy category is likely measuring the wrong competitive set. The available data doesn’t cleanly separate incremental occasions from substitution away from alcohol.

Brown-Forman’s fiscal year 2026 results make the same point in reverse. The company’s broader RTD portfolio grew 8% in net sales, and New Mix grew 37%. The Jack Daniel’s RTD/RTP portfolio declined 3%, down 5% on an organic basis, driven by lower U.S. volumes alongside distribution issues in Canada and pricing headwinds in Germany. The broader Jack Daniel’s whiskey franchise remained a growth priority in the same period.

Two formats, one brand, diverging trajectories. What Brown-Forman’s results show is that category and portfolio labels flatten what’s actually happening at the occasion level. This suggests that Jack Daniel’s RTD didn’t expand the brand’s occasions in a material way. It competed for the same moments the bottle was already losing to something else.

When the Query Replaces the Aisle

The commercial infrastructure is now being rebuilt in ways that make occasion logic operational at scale. In July 2024, Instacart launched Recipes, Occasions, and Bundles, a suite of merchandising tools designed to reach shoppers outside traditional aisle placements. Occasions are defined as curated cross-aisle collections around themes or moments. A consumer searching for spinach gets served a vegetable lasanga recipe featuring a branded pasta sauce. A summer barbecue occasion placement assembles products from across the store. The prompt, not the planogram, defines what goes together.

Instacart subsequently introduced an “out-of-aisle impressions” metric for recipes and occasions ad exposure; a holiday campaign for Bob’s Red Mill generated 85% out-of-aisle impressions, reaching shoppers who would never have encountered the product in their normal category path. By 2025 these tools were fully rolled out to Instacart’s 5,500-plus CPG advertising partners.

Most grocery trips are still largely aisle‑based, with digital surfaces being used to layer occasion logic on top of traditional category logic rather than replace it outright. Google launched its Universal Commerce Protocol in January 2026, open infrastructure for agentic commerce across discovery, buying, and post-purchase support. UCP itself is not organized around occasions (it's an agnostic protocol), but queries Google uses when demoing it are: finding a rug for a high-traffic dining room used for dinner parties, assembling a basket for a specific meal.

In an April 2026 McKinsey analysis with ICSC, researchers argued that as AI agents intermediate more purchase journeys, retailers will need to define each location by mission - convenience or discovery - rather than by category, pushing occasion and mission logic closer to the center of how stores are designed.

The prescription follows from the diagnosis. If the competitive set is whatever solves the same occasion, and if the occasion is becoming more selective, the strategic question is which occasions a brand owns clearly enough to be the answer when someone describes their evening to a search bar.

The brands still solely focused on legacy metrics like their share of category will have problems competing in this new world. The category is primarily a management technology. It only partially describes how people decided what to drink and that gap is widening as digital journeys become more mission and occasion‑driven.

Your competitive set is whatever comes up when someone describes their Friday night to a search bar. That search bar doesn’t know, or care, what aisle you’re on.

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The field agreed. The paper accumulated nearly 1,700 academic citations. It became a standard chapter in consumer behavior textbooks. The same issue of JCR that published it ran peer commentary in response, an editorial signal that the editors considered the argument worth debating immediately.

Marketing departments hired people with degrees who had read this paper in their sophomore year.

And then the industry went right back to slicing its customers by age, income, and gender.

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On a Friday night in January, a 42-year-old man in Austin pays $70 for a bottle of tequila. On Tuesday, the same man buys a $12 four-pack of RTD canned cocktails at a convenience store on his way home from work.

The industry looked at that behavior pattern and called it a barbell economy in response to income pressure. A consumer abandoning the premium tier.

This is a categorization error.

The man did not trade down. He walked into two different situations and made two different rational decisions. On Friday, he was hosting. The bottle was visible on the counter. It communicated something: about him, about the evening, about the people he was with. On Tuesday, he was tired. He wanted something cold that required no additional meaning. The RTD solved a completely different problem.

Same person. Different context.

NielsenIQ’s 2024 analysis of the RTD market found that 14 percent of U.S. beverage alcohol households buy beer, wine, spirits, and RTDs simultaneously, across all four categories in the same measurement period. Those households account for 29 percent of total category volume. The consumer who buys across the entire price spectrum is not the exception. He is the category’s most valuable customer.

When consumers substitute away from something to drink an RTD, the most displaced drink is beer. NIQ data suggests that when consumers substitute toward RTDs, the displacement often comes from beer and other low‑ceremony options, not from ultra‑premium spirits. They are not taking the $70 bottle’s occasion. NIQ data makes the consumption logic visible: 70 percent of RTDs are consumed the same day they’re purchased. That’s not a considered buy. It’s a context-driven one.

NielsenIQ’s on-premise measurement data from July 2025 makes the split explicit. Ultra-premium spirits gained 2.2 percentage points of share in nightclubs in 2024. The same period saw RTD volume growing in off-premise retail. The consumer buying ultra-premium tequila in a nightclub on Friday is the same person buying the $12 can at a convenience store on Tuesday, allocating spend based on context.

This is what Belk was describing in 1975. The marketing industry acknowledged him in syllabi and ignored him in boardrooms. The insight was available. The data infrastructure to act on it was not.

Demographic data was what syndicated panels, Nielsen household tracking, and survey segmentation could deliver at scale. Occasion-level data was expensive, proprietary, and operationally difficult. So the industry optimized for what it could measure. For decades, the most scalable syndicated systems told you who the consumer was, not which specific situation they were in.

That has changed. The occasion-level data now exists. And what it shows is not a barbell. It is a single consumer navigating multiple occasion states in the same week, with different identities activated in each one.

The psychologist Hazel Markus, writing in 1987, called this the working self-concept. The self is not a fixed structure carried uniformly across situations. At any given moment, only a subset of self-knowledge is active, shaped by the social environment, the physical setting, the stakes of the moment. When you are hosting a dinner, your social-host identity is active. When you are alone on a Tuesday, something else is.

Richard Thaler’s mental accounting work explains the financial mechanics: consumers assign different dollars to different mental accounts, each with its own logic. The $70 from the “special occasion” account and the $12 from the “weeknight” account are not the same dollar being spent twice. They are two different purchase decisions made by two different active selves, neither of which maps cleanly to the man’s age or income bracket.

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The industry has a version of this framework. It’s called occasion-based marketing, and I’ve been making the case for it in Proof Points for a while now: the more useful unit of analysis is not who the consumer is but what moment they’re in. The argument hasn’t changed. What Belk adds is the rationale underneath it: an explanation for why the same person runs different decision logic in different occasions, which is the part the standard occasion model tends to treat as a given rather than a finding.

The standard occasion framework describes demand correctly. It names the moments, sizes them, and maps which products tend to win them. What it doesn’t account for is that the consumer arriving at each moment is not the same person carrying the same preferences through different situations. They are running a different working self-concept, drawing from a different mental account, operating under different social stakes. That’s why demographic data fails to predict cross-occasion behavior: demographics describe the person, not the configuration of variables that determines how that person will act in a specific moment.

Here’s the sharper version of the problem. Even the brands that have adopted occasion thinking tend to operationalize it through a handful of key merchandising windows, like Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, and the holidays. That is the industry’s full occasion imagination for most of the calendar year. It leaves uncontested an enormous range of moments where people are already gathering, already drinking, already looking for something to reach for. Nowruz. Purim. Back to school and graduation weekends in college towns. Formula 1 Sunday mornings in U.S. cities. Watch parties organized around reality television.

None of these require a category-specific product. They require a brand that recognized the occasion existed.

The tequila category has produced the cleanest version of this data. Tequila grew from roughly $5 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2019 to over $13 billion in 2023, driven by the super-premium tier. By 2024–2025, the super‑premium tequila tier had begun to soften in retail scans, prompting a narrative that “the tequila boom is over.”

The actual picture is more specific. Tequila’s on-premise share kept growing. RTD tequila posted double‑digit year‑over‑year gains. Diageo’s tequila net sales around 20 percent in the six months ending December 2024. The consumer did not abandon tequila. They redistributed their tequila spending across occasions. The $70 bottle moved to the situations that justify it. The $12 can filled the ones that don’t.

Diageo appears to have understood this. When they launched Casamigos Margaritas RTDs in June 2025 (canned, non-carbonated, made with Casamigos blanco, priced around $14 for a four-pack), the stated framing was explicitly occasion-based. The RTD delivers the Casamigos experience for situations where mixing a cocktail is a barrier. It’s the same brand identity activated in a different context.

Brown-Forman’s experience with Jack Daniel’s RTDs illustrates what happens when that distinction gets blurred. Jack Daniel’s RTDs have softened while the core whiskey continues to grow, suggesting the RTDs were cannibalizing rather than expanding the brand’s occasions.

The question was never whether to launch an RTD. The question was which occasion the RTD solves for, and whether that occasion is actually different from the bottle’s occasion.

Wine didn’t simply lose drinkers between 2022 and 2024. It lost occasions. Wine's most dependable casual occasion, the evening wind-down, has lost significant share over the past two years, per IWSR data. The consumer who used to open a bottle at the end of a workday started reaching for something else: a hard seltzer, an RTD cocktail, a non-alcoholic option, sometimes nothing at all. The bottle of wine still exists in their life. The occasion that used to reliably call for it does not.

Demographics cannot explain this. The wine drinker did not age out of the category or hit an income wall. Their Tuesday evening changed. The structure of the moment shifted: less decompression ritual, more fragmented scrolling, less of the ambient permission that made opening a bottle feel automatic. Context changed. Behavior followed.

This is where the industry’s demographic playbook fails in a way that is genuinely hard to recover from. A brand can respond to a demographic shift: adjust positioning, find a new audience, reformulate for a younger palate. A brand cannot easily respond to an occasion shift it hasn’t noticed because it was never measuring occasions in the first place.

Demographics are not useless. They predict category preference reasonably well. A 55-year-old Boomer and a 24-year-old Gen Z consumer are likely to reach for different products given identical situations. But demographics do not predict purchase decisions within categories, across price tiers, or across occasions. Context does that.

IWSR’s 2025 Global Trends Report puts it in the industry’s own language: premiumization is no longer linear, with growth increasingly driven by ‘occasion relevance’ rather than only by status signaling. That’s the research apparatus of beverage alcohol arriving, fifty years late, at Belk’s conclusion.

The more precise version of the argument: demographics tell you what someone might want. Context tells you what they will do. A brand strategy built only on the former is targeting a consumer who exists in aggregate data and nowhere else.

Belk saw this in 1975 from a Temple University office with access to none of the data that now confirms it. The industry had fifty years and a textbook chapter. What it lacked was the measurement infrastructure to act on the insight, and, maybe, the willingness to rebuild the strategic muscle memory that had been running on demographic logic since before anyone in those boardrooms was born.

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