Hey, there! Log in / Register
Roxbury residents seek to bottle up nip sales on Blue Hill Avenue
By adamg on Wed, 04/29/2015 - 11:50am
Residents and the owners of a Blue Hill Avenue liquor store duked it out this morning over the store's request to start selling nips, at a hearing before the Boston Licensing Board.
The board decides tomorrow whether to let Blue Hill Liquors, 108 Blue Hill Ave., sell the tiny bottles.
The store's attorney, Ethan Schaff, said the store needs the nips to stay in business. He said that when the current owners took over the store two years ago, they agreed to a ban on nips to show the neighborhood they could clean the place up and run a respectable business.
"It was in horrible shape," he agreed. But now, after $300,000 in renovations, Blue Hill Liquors is a credit to the neighborhood. As a concession to the neighborhood, he said the store agreed to sell no nip for less than $2 - twice what nips go for at nearby liquor stores.
Schaff argued nips have an undeserved reputation. "It really is a way of hallmarking products," of showing off new types of drinks, he said. "It's really not a way to get people drunk, any more than any other [alcoholic] product is."
He continued "it's ridiculous" that three nearby liquor stores can sell nips, but his client can't.
Members of the Roxbury Path Forward Neighborhood Association, however, said they are tired of seeing and picking up empty nip bottles on their daily excursions and that nips are, in fact, a cheap way for the local alcoholics to get their drunk on early in the morning, when the stores first open.
And they said they never agreed to let the store come back to request permission to sell nips - the ban on nips was their condition for letting the current owners buy the store at all.
"We are trying to clean up our neighborhood," and more nips won't help, one longtime resident told the board.
The mayor's office and the offices of City Councilors Tito Jackson, Ayanna Pressley and Michelle Wu cited resident concerns in voicing opposition to the proposed nip sales.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Nips should have a bottle deposit
Of all products, nips should be included in the bottle bill. Since most customers that use nips are constantly return to the store, it would be easy.
Scratch tickets too!
I live down the block and around the corner from two small stores that both sell lottery (really about 1/4 mile) but almost every day I find pieces of torn up scratch tickets in my driveway. Its infuriating.
My thought is to add a 1 cent deposit to each ticket (similar to the bottle deposit). It would clear up the horrible littered mess.
Next stop, a fee on cigarette butts!
Imagine the clean curbs!!!
">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM[/youtube]
Hmm
I tend to agree with the anti-nip crowd. While I, myself, will buy one every so often (because I seldom drink and they are perfect for one or two mixed drinks), I see their point.
We have similar problems in Chelsealand with nips in Bellingham Square. Its littered everywhere, and the city did force two liquor stores to stop selling them (for a bit. I think), and it did help with the trash. Its gross, and I honestly outside of banning the things, there's little anyone can do to stop the trash really.
But in reality, banning nips like they did in Chelsea just forces the drunks to switch to something else to get their fix. During the ban, instead of nip bottles I started seeing the pocket sized bottles of vodka or rum everywhere (you know the pint sized bottles), which aren't much more than the nips. So the drunks will get their fix regardless of what size it comes in and will still continue to litter the bottles.
so not sure what else can be done about it and its trash. I feel this group's pain.. I do.
Has anyone suggested to the
Has anyone suggested to the liquor stores that engaging in periodic neighborhood litter-pickups be a condition of their getting permission to sell these things, rather than trying to ban them?
What if
We passed this burden onto the manufacturer/distributor who prodocues them? Make it a city-wide thing that if they want to distrubute these products in the city then they need to pay a royalty/fee of some sort allocated to the cleanup of neighborhoods,etc. just a thought
Yeah
I think it was asked, I'll ask my city councilman about that. (Matt frank are you listening?)
But the litter from these extends way beyond around the store. I mean I live a block or so away and I see them too in my front yard and all over.
Has anyone suggested to the
This should also be a zoning requirement for all coffee shops, pizza, and convenience stores. They should maintain a barrel outside their door, and have some level of responsibility for general litter pickup within a 2 block radius.
they never agreed to let the
Just why should a busybody neighborhood group (which has NO legal authority to dictate licensing rules) be allowed to tell a business "hey, you can't petition for reconsideration of an arbitrary requirement" anyway?
And if "litter" is such a serious concern, then why doesn't the Licensing Board call every Dunkin's on the carpet for selling coffee in styrofoam cups? Or cite every conveinence store that sells scratch tickets? Both of those create just as much, if not more of, a trash problem than nip bottles do.
Time to end this sham of a wasteful and expensive bureauracy called the Boston Licensing Board.
Address the public drinking instead of sales of nips
I drive by this store twice daily on my way to and from work and very frequently see people drinking on the sidewalk with brown paper bags. The residents should work with the police to stop the sidewalk drinking instead of stopping the sales of nips.
Come to think of it this is a common occurrence all along BHA and would be an easy target for handing out violations for drinking in public and probably get a few warrant dodgers in the process :)
Or how about we stop treating
Or how about we stop treating adults like children? Allow public drinking. Many cities in the US do, and nearly all in Europe, and they don't have a problem. Why can't I take a drink with me when I stroll along the waterfront?
The problem isn't drinking in public and never has been. Let's confine the law to the narrowest possible way to address the problem. We need to stop littering, and we need to stop disorderly conduct. Those issues are where the laws and enforcement need to be.
Public drinking laws
are about controlling minorities, and the homeless population. They came into vogue in the 1970s, as a replacement for status offenses like "vagrancy" and "being a common drunk" once those earlier laws were declared unconstitutional. Before about the mid 70s to early 80s, public drinking was considered quite normal. You used to see businessmen in Manhattan in the 1970s-early 80s drinking a beer out of a paper bag on their way to the train and nobody thought a thing of it. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/14/public-drinking-laws_n_4312523....
It's obnoxious behavior that's the problem, not drinking itself. Arrest people who are causing problems, not the person who steps onto a sidewalk with a beer.
But, you know, Puritans.
Legalized bigotry
Same with drugs and gun control. Rich European people trying to keep ethnic types down for behavior or ownership of items they wish to keep exclusively for themselves.
New England calls it puritanism. Down south its known as Jim Crow. Two sides of the same dirty coin.
At the same time, let's ban
Dunkin' Donuts cups, plastic water bottles, lottery tickets and Charlie Tickets.
I tend to see more of that trash on the streets and sidewalks than nip bottles.
p.s. I wish people (of all shapes, sizes and colors) were taught not to litter in the first place. Oh, wait a minute...
Wow, tons of good comments.
Before I read the whole story I was completely anti-nip. (They are all being used to drink inappropriately and then there's the litter thing.) But then this place has a good point that 2 other stores nearby are selling them, so why can't we?
In the end, I think the downside to nips outweighs any positives (like "I want to try this new liquor" or "I only need enough to make one cocktail.") They should disallow all three of the stores from selling them, and then they are all on a level field.
Also, great comment about public brown-bag drinking. That is totally a police issue. I don't care what neighborhood I'm in, if I see a guy drinking out of a brown bag, it sends a bad message about the kind of people who frequent that area. BHA isn't that bad, but open drinking is not going to do anything to make it a better place.
what about the downside of,
what about the downside of, you know, limiting people's freedom?
Bunny Colvin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YrWiwUM3FA
Nip Bottles should be banned completely
My significant other and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood in Medway recently.
We've noticed in the past that large amounts of garbage, bottles, debris,
are scattered around the Cottage St. area cemetery and the surrounding streets.
We took a grabber and a plastic garbage bag to try to pick up some of this stuff. We walked
along Cottage St. past the graveyard, and several of the neighboring streets for about
half an hour, picking up items as we went.
The thing that shocked us the most is how many alcoholic "nip" bottles (single serving)
that we found in our walk. While we found McDonalds, Dunkins and aluminum cans etc.
the majority of the debris were these nip bottles. It's obvious to us and we've seen
this happen, that people toss these out of car windows as they drive along.
These people may be teens or drivers who don't want to have an unopened bottle of liquor if
they get stopped, so they use these nip bottles and throw them out the window when they're done.
We filled up an entire garbage bag with mostly nip bottles in half an hour... This
indicates to us that these nip bottles present a serious problem. They seem to be not only
messing up the environment and doing harm to animals but they also show how many people
are drinking and driving in the area. We have to wonder how many of these are underage.
It occurred to us that the sale of nip liquor bottles perhaps should be prohibited in the town
and in the state. It's a start.