Drying Out In The Summer

Well we're halfway through the summer party season. The heat is through the roof and vacations are in full swing. People are piling into their cars in a effort to escape each other and head to campgrounds and cottages, only to find that they are caught up on the parking lots that are highways, mired in the people they are trying to flee. Holiday weekends are the worst, with absolutely everybody trying to get anywhere but where they were during the week. Once the destinations are reached, bottles are popped open and refreshing beverages are consumed.

As big a part of summer vacationing as the destination and company is the drinking. Holiday weekends see massive lineups at the liquor stores in the week leading into it, with massive lineups on the Friday. This week things are possibly going to be even worse. 5,400 workers that run the liquor stores here in Ontario, the LCBO, are poised to go on strike this Thursday. They plan to disrupt the flow of sweet nectar by blockading the warehouses and sitribution centers. This weekend is the civic weekend, a holiday weekend given to ease the pressure of having to work during the warm summer season. The timing of the strike is perfect from an impact standpoint. These guys are looking to pull the plug before one of the LCBO's largest weekends of the year. From a customer standpoint it will be pure hell. The LCBO is making sure people know there is a strike coming and warning people to stock up, so you can imagine that on Thursday, since most people wait until the last minute, these stores will be absolutely insane.

The big sticking point for this strike, for once, has nothing to do with money. Here our liquor stores are publicly run and the workers are scared that privatization will happen. There has been talk about selling it all off and letting a company handle it all. They want a clause in their contracts that says they will lose no jobs or have no stores closed when the government sets to allow some private "agent stores" to open up. If they go on strike they will stop all product flow. Restaurants and bars will be unable to purchase additional stock and people will have to camp sober. They will vacation sober and camp without the aid of copious amounts of booze. The horror.

People everywhere will be without the ability to purchase liquor and fruit coolers. Teenagers won't be able to buy their alcoholic fruity drinks or vodka based lemonades and coolers. Fortunately for the masses though we will still be able to buys beer and wine from stores and vintners. This strike could cripple restaurants and other entertainment facilities (there are 17,000 liquor serving permits on record) who buy almost $1,000,000 a day from the LCBO. It could do wonders for the population at large though. If this strike goes on long enough it could create a massive rift in the province. Imagine society falling back to a primal sort of battleground clearly divided into two distinct groups.

Half of us will be the beer drinking masses, cheering for our sports and cursing and yelling and creating havoc by the bucketful. The other half would be the wine drinking masses. They are likely to be a quieter bunch who scoff at we beer drinkers while they head off to their jazz festivals and theatre shows. As the divide continues to fester it will be only a matter of time before the inevitable occurs. The beer drinkers will have enough beer so that they become the invincible uber-warriors they think they are when they get loaded up, like popeye and his spinach, and take on the wine-folk. Shouting things like "What are you looking at wine boy?", they'll start pushing the wine-folk around until it their polite veneer fractures and it all descends into chaos. People would barricade the streets and the cities would fall into a warzone like state. Houses will be fortified with sheets of plywood and cases of empty beer. Empties would be hurled at one another while corks are shot across streets with anger. One would have to wonder if the government will deploy their new technology to take advantage of the situation. As the civil chaos grows, we will watch with bated breath to see if it spills beyond the borders on Ontario and takes the country with it. The only thing keeping the whole thing in check is the fact that we are Canadians and are afraid of starting massive conflict, but once we get drinking......

We all pray for a quick resolution before it all comes apart. If it all spirals out of control I'll try to keep posting in the middle of the conflict so that the world will know what happened.

Wish me luck, I'm going in.