I THINK - not sure - that whether a grocery will carry beer and wine is decided on a store by store basis. My local grocery does carry it, but the selection is, at best, meh. There are actual liquor stores which have a better selection, so I go there ... although there's a convenience store just up the street from my place that has wine and beer - all the beer is cold, but only some of the wine. Again, the selection is limited, but it's close to home.

I still think of it as a novelty that I can get alcohol in many supermarkets now and feel guilty that I don't go to the liquor stores I used to go to that often anymore.

msbelle, good luck settling in!

California we can buy it all in a grocery store. Also most drugs stores. The CVS near my office has a pretty big liquor section.

Rhody has no alcoholic beverages of any kind in supermarkets. Very annoying.

Same in Massachusetts. MA tried to overturn the law with a ballot initiative a few years ago, but the police union came out strongly against it, so it failed.

NYC used to have laws against serving alcohol in restaurants before noon, which was kind of a bummer if you went to brunch at 11 and wanted a mimosa. Not sure if that law actually changed or is just no longer enforced.

That used to be the case on Sundays in Georgia. Made working the brunch shift extra aggravating. (And you couldn't buy at stores on Sundays at all.)

Illinois you can buy beer, wine, liquor at grocery and convenience stores. It's nice.

Same in Massachusetts. MA tried to overturn the law with a ballot initiative a few years ago, but the police union came out strongly against it, so it failed.

Actually many of the markets in this part of MA have at least wine and beer now, and a couple even have hard alcohol. I think there is a limit on how many of them can have a liquor license in the area.

I learned not terribly long ago that drug stores usually have a pretty good selections of booze because during Prohibition you could buy alcohol with a prescription, so of course they carried whatever they could. With I believe somewhat similar backgrounds to soda/ice cream counters although those have waned more - the syrups were used for tonics, nostrums, elixirs and whatnot

I don't know how that is affected by state law.

Some of the Trader Joes around here (Boston, MA) have wine and beer, depending on how the liquor licenses are permitted by the towns, but the Sunday no-liquor-before-noon is observed by the aisles being roped off.

NH still has state liquor stores, one of which does a busy tax-free business just across the MA line up Rt 93.

In typical MA fashion, they've gotten rid of the blue law, but in a stupid way. Each supermarket chain can have a certain number of liquor licenses now. So when TJ's wanted to have liquor in a new store, they had to take it out of an existing one.

(This is like when they started selling liquor on Sundays, but only within a certain distance of the New Hampshire border. Is it a sin or not???)