Day Drinking All Night –

March 31, 2020 –  …with in-person meetings cancelled, and massive server overloads making the online meetings choppy and unreliable. It’s bad enough that these people have to look through all of our boozebag social media posts, many of which I have thoughtlessly embedded in this article. But Business Insider brings us the absolutely heartbreaking story that online trolls are crashing recovery meetings held on the platform Zoom, and taunting and humiliating the people in recovery. You’d be forgiven for blacking out around sundown and not having even noticed yet that liquor stores across San Francisco are being forced to close at 8 p.m. every night now, according to KRON 4. Mayor Breed issued that order Friday, another of the expanded shelter in place orders now in effect until at least May 1. 

Any cursory scrolling of social media you’ve done in the last two weeks — and yes, it has only been 14 days since this started — will show you that drinking alcohol has become a preferred pastime in the age of COVID-19. We now have the data to back this “No sh*t, Sherlock” observation; on the heels of Eater National’s report that alcohol sales are skyrocketing (“Three-liter boxed wine is up 53 percent”), the Chronicle follows up with a report that Wine.com is seeing a 400 percent increase in spirits sales, from which Eater highlights the conclusion that Bay Area residents are drinking 42 percent more alcohol whilst stuck home.

@SFist