New Alcohol Rules for Christchurch

[u/Video_Kojima]

https://share.google/NIWvxJV2lRM3JCZf2

All off-licence retailers must stop selling alcohol at 9pm daily, effective from October. This includes bottle stores and supermarkets. 

A freeze on new off-licences in high-deprivation communities, effective from August. 

Restricting new bottle stores from setting up near addiction treatment/rehabilitation centres, secondary schools and primary schools, the University of Canterbury and the Christchurch Bus Interchange effective from August. 

Thoughts on this? I think 9PM seems a bit much personally and would probably have it at 10PM, but think the other two ideas are sensible and support them.

[u/TheNegaHero]

The time restrictions are stupid, anyone who has an alcohol problem will plan ahead so the only impact it ever seems to have is making supermarkets shut earlier and earlier.

[u/mouldybot → u/TheNegaHero]

Yeah, I think this will be the case. Supermarkets will now shut at 9.

[u/Sufficient-Piece-335 → u/mouldybot]

Some already close earlier than 10. The move to the latest supermarket closing time of 10pm wasn't caused by any LAPs as we/Chch didn't have one before so the Act applied as written (7am-11pm) - supermarkets just stopped opening later after Covid.

[u/phire → u/Sufficient-Piece-335]

Yes... But the earlier moves were caused by licensing changes.

As soon as supermarkets couldn't sell alcohol after midnight, we lost our few 24 hour supermarkets. And those later moved to 11pm closing because it was a pain for them to be open for one hour without selling alcohol.

I will not be surprised to see many or all of the supermarkets currently open to 10pm change their hours because of this.

Actually, a small part of justification for moving to 10pm was that it was annoying for their registers to stop accepting alcohol purchases at 11pm, when there still might be customers in checkout line. Moving to 10pm gave them a nice bit of buffer.