My European Trip, Part 2: Drinking in Sweden
More stuff on Stockholm:
Drinking:
Liquor is extremely expensive there.H ard liquor drinks came out to about $20 USD a pop or more, beers came out to $10 USD. It’s not just a currency exchange thing either, I think even for Swedish people it’s not exactly cheap. If you’re American and are dealing with the shitty state of the US dollar, the problem is even worse.
My solution was to buy bunch of liquor for the hotel so that we could “pregame.” I’d spend all day walking around Stockholm sightseeing, expecting to spot a liquor store at some point and buy liquor then. I never saw one. By my third day, after two nights of spending a lot of money at bars and nightclubs, I asked someone, and he explained it to me. The government has a monopoly on the sale of alcohol, so you can only get it from the nonprofit, government-run liquor store Systembolaget. There are only a handful of them in the city. From Systembolaget’s own website, in their own words, this is their mission:
Having a monopoly is a good start. It means we can maintain a more comprehensive product range, more
rigorous.
One reason only
The retail monopoly exists for one reason only: alcohol related problems are reduced if alcohol is sold in the absence of a profit motive. Our mandate obliges us to help limit the medical and social damage caused by alcohol and there by improve public health. Total alcohol consumption levels shall also be kept low by limiting availability by steering the retail outlet network and opening hours. Systembolaget also differs from other companies in that we are brand-neutral and do not engage in active marketing in an attempt to boost sales. Systembolaget also provides information on the risks associated with alcohol consumption.
Our responsibility
Systembolaget’s mandate is based on consideration for public health. Our goal is to establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby everyone can enjoy Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either themselves or other people. Systembolaget shall use its
expertise to inform customers both about the effects of the various drinks on people’s health and about their taste characteristics. Systembolaget shall inspire people to take an interest in what they drink and to adopt a healthy attitude towards alcohol.Our mandate
Systembolaget’s mandate is to limit the medical and social damage caused by
alcohol and thereby improve public health. For Systembolaget, this means:
- restricting availability through
- the number of stores
- opening hours
- retail rules
- not attempting to maximise our profit
- not promoting additional sales
- being brand-neutral
- providing a high standard of customer service
- being financially efficientOur vision
Systembolaget shall establish a healthy drinking culture, whereby we can enjoy
Systembolaget’s drinks without harming either ourselves or other people.
It sounds good, but I’m kind of skeptical on any law that exists to protect people from themselves. After finding out about this law, a lot of Swedish activity I noticed previously suddenly made sense to me. I remember reading about how during the Prohibition in America, public drunkenness was worse because people had to do most of all of their drinking at the public speakeasy. Drinking at home was difficult, and access to liquor was almost impossible except through illegal means, so when people went to the speakeasy they would hit the liquor hard because it was too difficult to drink any other time of the day or at any other places, then stumble home stinking drunk.
An anonymous commenter at a Swedish blog describes the situation as thus:
I don’t agree with Systemet one bit. For those living outside Sweden who think it’s a good idea try living with it before passing judgement.
Try living with the fact that if you decide at 5pm on Saturday to have guests over for dinner and wine that Systemet already closed at 3pm. Forget about buying anything on Sundays, Systemet is completely closed. Unlike in the US where liquor stores are typically closed on Sunday, usually wine or beer can be bought at grocery stores, convenience stores (ie 7-11), beer stores, and wine stores.
Oh, and want to try out that tequila you had in Mexico that was so good? Forget it. You have to choose between the two or three that Systemet imports (and Systemet imports the most vile crap I’ve ever tasted). Getting anything special has so much red tape that people just avoid it.
What about that draught beer machine you saw in Denmark that’s also available in the rest of the EU? Forget it. Unless Systemet has approved it you can’t buy it here, and the company who makes it will refuse to ship it to Sweden (and any beer that’s made for it).
Since you’re from the US here’s an example of where this breaks down? You know all of those very good wines from California and Washington State? Unless it’s a huge wine company (ie Gallo) you won’t find them here, and when you do you have to pay a lot more than usual for mediocre wine.
Government involvement and regulation is perfectly fine with me, but Systemet is not the correct answer. The correct answer is to license individual stores/outlets for the sale of alcohol (this includes online). Don’t decide what is imported nationwide, let the individual businesses decide based on their clients. If the business is located outside of Sweden but still within the EU then the sale should be governed by EU law, not Swedish law.
While the Systembolaget monopoly is not the same as an all out prohibition, it does really restrict how and when you can get drunk, which is why I think when people in Stockholm get a chance to drink at a bar, restaurant and nightclub, they are really overboard with it. At a party here, you see at the end of the night people who are drunk off their ass, people who are just moderately drunk, people who are just tipsy, and people who are sober. In Sweden almost everyone at the end of the night was seriously wasted. And since very few people drive to parties, there’s no need to worry about designated drivers.
So I’m not really sure how this monopoly goes toward promoting safe drinking. Maybe Sweden was just that much worse before the monopoly, and what I’m seeing is the improvement, but currently they are still some hard drinking motherfuckers. Even the classiest, ritziest looking people were drinking until sloppy drunk. I remember partying at the Berns hotel (ridiculously awesome spot, if you can get in. Highly recommended.), and when it hit 3 AM, watching the partygoers try to navigate themselves down the stairs at once. It was comical to see hundreds of people who drank themselves into oblivion try to all walk down a narrow outdoor staircase at once when they’re unable to even walk a straight line.
The public drunkenness is outrageous. Walking back to my hotel, I’d just see people straggling drunk in the street all over the place. A block from my hotel as the sun was rising I had to step over two decked out girls laying on their backs laughing and screaming hysterically, unable to even stand up and walk. They just laid on their backs, cackled, and screamed at the sky, then made a futile effort to stand up before falling back and cackling all over again. Apparently no one is afraid of getting raped there.
My recommendation would be to get as much liquor as allowed from duty-free at the airport before getting to your hotel, and after arriving, map out the Systembolagets in town, find the closest one to you and re-up there periodically, so that you don’t have to depend strictly on the bars and nightclubs to get drunk.
Part 3 about Swedish partying and Swedish men will be up in a few hours
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fascinating stuff! can’t wait for part III.
oh yeah, the systembolaget sounds like some bullsh!t.
Finland’s government also has a monopoly. Anything over 4.7% can only be sold by them. Seems Norway and Iceland have state monopolies too.
I don’t drink alcohol at all so it’s all the same to me.
The monopoly is an attempt to keep the levels of alcohol consumption somewhat moderate. The alcohol related culture in the Nordic countries is pretty messed up. When the finns cut their taxes on booze a few years ago, deaths due to liver cirrhosis increased with 30% within one year and total alcohol consumption went up with 10%.
“Having seen increases in binge drinking among youths in the months after it slashed alcohol taxes by more than 40 percent, the government of Finland is now reporting that alcohol has become the leading killer of the nation’s adults.
The Toronto Star reported Dec. 9 that according to data from the government’s leading health and welfare agency, more than 2,000 people ages 15 to 64 in Finland died from alcohol poisoning or alcohol-related illnesses in 2005. Close to another 1,000 Finns died from alcohol-related accidents or violent incidents.
For the first time in the nation’s history, alcohol surpassed heart disease as the leading killer of males ages 15 to 64, accounting for 17 percent of all deaths in this age group in 2005.”
http://www.jointogether.org/ne.....op-in.html
“Alcohol has become the leading cause of death in Finland for men, and is a close second for women, a study says.
Figures for 2005 released by the state statistics agency showed alcohol killed more people aged 15 to 64 than cardiovascular disease or cancer.
Almost as many women died of alcohol-related causes as breast cancer last year.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6106570.stm
“Systemet” sucks in many ways and the poor openings hours are hassle, but there’s a decent reason for it’s existence. On the plus side, Systembolaget belongs to the biggest buyers of wine in the world so the prices on wine are actually often pretty decent and the selection is usually good, even in smaller towns.
M. – I heard about alcoholism in Finland, and it seems like even now it’s a HUGE problem there. According to Finnish people I met (I spent a flight next to a Finnish woman and had a layover in Finland for a few hours), not only is alcoholism really bad there, but there is a lot of alcohol-fueled violence there too. Finnish guys seemed to have a lot more machismo than the Stockholm metrosexuals I encountered, and fit more into the big, tough viking stereotype we Americans imagine among Scandinavians than Stockholm men do. To add to your stats, in the years 1987-1996, more than half the violent deaths among 15-65 years olds were alcohol-related! So you may be right, in Finland such a monopoly may indeed be helpful. But at the same time, I’m convinced there has to be another way. I guess it’s just the libertarian in me, but I feel that if you give people control over their own lives, they’ll eventually get it right.
At the same time, based on what the Finnish girl next to me on the plane said about Finns and their drinking, I know I’m going to be careful to never get really smashed in Finland dive bar.
I’m more or less libertarian when it comes to my political views, so I’d also want to see an alternative to the alcohol monopoly, but I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future. This country is more or less run by socialists and people in general are so used to the state babysitting them that’s it’s unlikely that any changes will happen unless the EU forces us to get rid of the monopoly.
The cultural differences between swedes and finns are pretty interesting. There’s a sizable finnish minority in Sweden – we’re talking about a few hundred thousand finns – and I belong to them, sort of. I’m born in Stockholm but my parents are finnish. There’s this stereotype among swedes that finns are sauna bathing, knife wearing alcoholics and in Finland, it’s not that uncommon for people to insist that all swedish men are gay.
During the last couple of years (I’m in my early twenties) I’ve intentionally emphasized the finnishness in me to discern myself from the typical metrosexual swede. I’m always walking around with a few mm of stubble, long & unkept hair and less than stylish clothes. I tend to have a just slightly more aggressive and non-PC attitude than the typical swede.
In any other country I’d be considered a pussy, but here among middle class swedes, it’s not unusual for guys that are way bigger than me (I’m small as fuck) to take an submissive attitude in their interactions with me. Something that I find hilarious as hell — I spent my early teens in front of a computer. It’s not an strategy that I plan to use for ever, but for now, my semi-faux badboyish attitude gives me pretty decent results and I plan to go on “looking like a criminal”, as one girl described me, for some years to come.
Stockholm rocks if you’re a guy and have even a modicum of balls.
Haha, this is so true. Both sides really do characterize each other this way.
You know, your description of a sizeable Finnish minority makes a lot of sense to me looking back. I mentioned in my “partying in Stockholm” post that I met some cool guys in Sweden that didn’t fit in with the other Swedish guys and were cool and had a great swagger about them. I just thought they were Stockholm guys who weren’t metrosexual. But based on your description of the “Finnish look,” they may have been part of that sizeable Finnish minority. They had the stubble, long unkempt hair and weren’t as over-the-top stylish as the other Stockholm guys I was meeting.
Excessive drinking is usually a sign of huge social problems. Lubricant as you suggest in your next post, to enable social interaction and counteract shyness, and also self-medicating for depression and such.
England has now, and has always had unless rigorously socialized, a drinking problem. So it’s not unique to Sweden/Finland. Heck the Romans described the Britons as a bunch of drunkards, things got very little better with the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, or the Normans for that matter. During the Georgian era, gin was the drink of choice and people would be passed out as you describe at all hours of the day. Victorian reformers got people to switch to milder beer, and enacted strict closing laws.
Sexual assault is a problem in Sweden, but from the Muslim minority which finds the Swedes a bunch of degenerates, for obvious reasons. It is not discussed because of PC/Multicultural reasons.
I don’t think the monopoly or not is the problem — rather the deep seated inhibitions that PC imposes on interaction between the sexes, lack of mediating institutions for young people to get together (sober), and the isolating factor urban anonymity.
Finland’s system is actually now very different from Sweden/Norway. Once the iron curtain fell Estonia and Russia were instantly invaded by Finns filling car trunks with cheap alcohol. It’s just dozens of miles from Helsinki to Tallinn and the EU took even customs away, so Finland has been forced to reform the system.
Not to worry, though. We’re still being protected. After losing control over prices the government has decided to try regulations. I’m heading off to the grocery store and it’s fun to see if I again run into someone trying to buy beer at 8:30 – it’s legal for stores to open at 7 am on Wednesdays but it’s now illegal to sell alcohol until 9 am.
whiskey, for “urban anonymity” to have anything to do with it the rurals would need to drink less. NOT so. Especially teenage drinking is *vastly* easier there: we could put miles between us and adults, hell, it was easy enough that we could make our own stuff. (I’ve always wondered if there’s a good English expression for the crudest homemade alcohol. You know, teenager + cola bottle + sugar + baking yeast? We spent half of our English classes trying to find a translation for the all-important brew and never found one.)
If you’re referring to kilju, I don’t think there’s a translation for it. As I understand it, it can’t be called moonshine because it’s not a distilled drink.
i there are good and bad attributes to the systembolaget. i think the idea that it is protecting people is entirely valid, but by the same logic, why isn’t alcohol banned? since there exists no advertising and no profit motive, you won’t find hoards of teenagers drinking bud and miller light. the people of sweden are shy yet trusting people. but buy a swedish girl a drink and she is yours for the night. the author clearly hasn’t spent much time there at all. such a comment regarding rape could only come from a terrified westerner. in sweden you’ll see kids walking home from sledding or skating in the dark (mostly because it is always dark) no problem! for those looking to get cheap alcohol in sweden, just bring it in. bring in your favorite bottle of scotch and a few of your favorite wines and show enough restraint to save them for special occasions. try local beers or maybe the akvavit spirit. always remember though… stockholm is an island inside of sweden.
My rape comment was a compliment about the safety of Sweden, not an insult to the Swedish women who walk around late alone. I’m saying it’s a wonderful thing that the country is apparently safe enough that a woman can walk around shitfaced drunk at 4 or 5 AM by herself with no fear, because in American big cities a woman couldn’t without facing a lot more risk.