Never on Sunday has become sometimes on Sunday.
Michael Inabinet set up his sidewalk sign with the smiling, yawning grapes on it outside Pet Wines on the Upper East Side just before noon last Sunday and awaited the stampede of the thirsty masses. "We usually get a run on Champagne for mimosas," he said.
A few minutes later in East Harlem at Rivera's Wine and Liquors on First Avenue, the customers were already out in force. Warnell Armstead, a manager at the Copacabana, gripped a big blue bottle of Skyy vodka and was going to walk the two blocks home to watch the Knicks.
PHOTO: THE NEW YORK TIMES
"I don't have to go to New Jersey anymore," he said with a smile.
Over on the West Side, at Roma Discount Wine and Liquors on Amsterdam Avenue, Denise Yantin and her friend Wendy Greenfield were stocking up on vodka and triple sec, the active ingredients in cosmopolitans, for the evening's Sex and the City finale party.
Since May, liquor stores in New York have been allowed by state law to stay open on Sundays as long as they close one other day. And while only 15 percent of stores in New York City have taken up the offer, those that have say that business is good to great.
"Fantastic," said Henry Kim, Roma's president and Sunday cashier. "More sales than Tuesday," when he is now closed; "half as many hours."
"Twice as good as Tuesday," said Mek Motyka, co-owner of Stare Miasto Liquor Store in Ridgewood, Queens, as he took a bottle of chilled vodka out the refrigerator and slid it across the counter to a taciturn man with a florid nose.
In this world of instantaneous commercial access, banning the sale of certain products during certain hours seems quaint, if potentially annoying. But such is the legacy of New York's blue laws.
The only publicly accessible place a person can legally obtain alcohol before noon on a Sunday is still a church. The recent state law, enacted last May, was a compromise proposed by the liquor lobby, which was promoting seven-day-a-week sales as a way to increase tax revenue.
Even the partial loosening of the law, and the limited participation by stores, has been good for state coffers, according to tax figures compiled by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a lobbying group.
From June to October last year, New York state excise-tax revenue from wine and hard liquor sales rose by US$4.2 million, or 7.1 percent, compared with the same period in 2002, the council says. While economic recovery may have spurred some of the increase, the council notes that excise taxes from beer, which is sold seven days a week, fell by 2.2 percent in the same period.
But the semi-deregulation has also spawned a patchwork system rife with information gaps and other market inefficiencies. A Sunday spent store-hopping in three boroughs turned up plenty of people traveling farther than they needed to buy liquor because they did not know about stores near home that were open. Many other customers seemed to be just discovering, by accident, that Sunday sales were now legal.
In parts of the city where Sunday is not the prevailing day of rest, the decision to open on Sundays was relatively easy. "I've always been closed on Saturday because I'm Jewish," said Cheryl Shalom, owner of Chateau Shalom on the fringe of the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Midwood, Brooklyn. "So I'm gaining a sixth day." There are 14 stores in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn that are closed on Saturday and open on Sunday.
Elsewhere, though, the calculus is tricky. "I tried closing on Tuesdays for about two weeks," said Manuel Corea, the owner of Allman Fine Wine and Liquors in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "It wasn't bad. I just don't have a lot of foot traffic on my block on Sundays, and it wasn't worth the fact that many of my customers were complaining on Wednesdays that I was closed the day before."
The gates were also shuttered at Columbus Wine and Spirits, a block away from Roma's on the Upper West Side. The co-owner, Harry Gordon, said while he thought he could do a reasonable Sunday trade, "to close on one of the other days, in terms of deliveries and in terms of just running a business, would present problems."
"I also think the people who work for us deserve to have a day off when everybody else is off," he added. "They should get to be with their families."
Not surprisingly, many of the 150 stores in the city now open on Sundays are in places where weekend shopping options abound.
At Uva Wines, in the hip mini-mall on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brian Knott, an employee, said that Sunday had become the second-busiest day, after Saturday.
"People seem to have a lot more time than during the week, so they do a lot more shopping," he said. "On Sundays we do a lot more hand sales," the term for when a salesman walks the customer through the selection process.
At the new Whole Foods Market on Columbus Circle, a modest bacchanal was underway (this was Sunday, after all). "I'm Lane Tanner and this is my Syrah," said the proprietor of Lane Tanner Winery in Santa Maria, California, as she handed plastic cups of it to anyone within reach.
"You can't pour wine in a shop like this in California," Tanner said, "so this is really unique for me." She signed a bottle for a customer, "To Fouad and Dina, for your friendship."
Sunday liquor sales have had another positive effect: they have cut crime, or at least one particular crime.
"Sure beats the bootleggers," Rene Martinez said in front of Rivera Wine and Liquors as he cracked the seal on a US$3.75 pint of Barton vodka. Martinez, 46, a retired seaman and self-described alcoholic, explained that bootleggers charged US$5 for the same flask.
His drinking buddy, Nathaniel Gibbs, said that as long as there had been Sunday bans on liquor sales, there had been entrepreneurs who made strong drink available, at a premium. "You're standing less than 27 feet from one," he said.
While Sunday sales have probably hurt the bootlegging industry, it is less clear whether they have also cut into the business of legitimate bars and of liquor stores in New Jersey, which have long been open Sundays.
It did not immediately seem so. The New Jersey treasury department said it had not noticed any drop in liquor excise tax proceeds, and the liquor manager at the Food Emporium in Fort Lee, near the George Washington Bridge, said that his Sunday business was steady.
Sunday night on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, across the street from Oceana Liquors, which was locking up after its busiest day of the week (big run on triple sec and vodka, the owners said), the Sunday manager at the Wicked Monk pub, Maria Mangiameli, said she had not seen any drop-off either.
"People come here because they want to come to the bar or hear the music, not because they want to get bombed," she said.
At the end of the bar, Deanna Gebhart sat before a glass of something beige and a steel thermos. The thermos held latte that she had brought from home. The glass held latte fortified by the bartender with a shot of Licor 43.
Gebhart, 48, a trainer for a bank, explained why there would always be a place for bars, even if liquor stores were open every day.
"If I had a bottle of that at home," she said, pointing at the Licor 43 on the shelf, "I wouldn't have a bottle of it at home, if you know what I mean. I can't drink that till I come here. It's discipline. If I wanted to get drunk at home, I would just drink beer."
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