When he discovered that the coronavirus lockdown was coming, my best friend stocked up with eight handles of vodka--”necessary provisions,” he called them. Well, it turns out Matt wasn’t alone in this as alcohol sales, according to Nielsen, were up 55% in the third week of March from the same week last year. There’s a lot to unpack in these numbers, so we put in the alcohol industry market research to understand and qualify this uptick, explain why we feel this surge is only temporary, and outline the ways in which these gains have been unevenly distributed.
