For the first time in Gallup’s 90-year polling history, a majority of Americans now view moderate alcohol consumption as bad for one’s health. Just 54 percent of American adults say they drink alcohol, and 49 percent tell pollsters they’d like to cut back in 2025.
In particular, Gen-Z seems to have gotten the memo on alcohol’s dangers. Adults under 35 are the least likely to drink, with fully 40 percent living an entirely dry lifestyle. Women are most likely to have cut back their consumption between 2020 and 2025, which fits a pattern: COVID lockdowns showed people alcohol’s ugly power.
Many middle-aged and older folk who’ve cut back recently cited the COVID-19 lockdowns as a source of clarity about their drinking patterns. Without daily obligations or anyone to see or judge them, many people livened up the boredom and isolation with an afternoon cocktail. And then a lunchtime cocktail. And without an early commute and in-person meetings, not to mention the existential dread of a global crisis, perhaps it would be okay to stay up late and have one more in the evening. Zoom meetings became online happy hours. Everything from true crime to personal finance advice was paired with a cocktail recipe and a boozy delivery service. Disposable income rose, fueled by stimulus checks and the largely closed entertainment sector. Spending at liquor stores soared in the weeks after checks were mailed, and a survey from Wallethub estimated 24 million Americans spent some of their stimulus money on alcohol.
Casual critics of capitalism might see the profit motive in companies keeping Americans drinking alcohol, regardless of its dangers. Young people can likely recall the denials and cynical obfuscations of Big Tobacco and might be justified in finding fault with Big Booze as well. Most people imagine alcohol execs as something like the Merchants of Death in Thank You for Smoking: shady characters representing human vices, conspiring to fill our shopping carts with vodka, cigarettes, and loaded firearms.
No doubt, alcohol is pushed on us by brands that want us to associate various formulations of ethanol with the fulfillment of every desire: be cool, popular, confident, loved, and an excellent dancer. The elixir is in the cooler full of ice near your beach volleyball game, or delivered to your table from a handsome stranger. Alcohol product placements and tippling characters saturate streaming services.
But unlike advertising, markets are value-neutral. They don’t tell us what we should want; they deliver whatever we’re willing to pay for. Yuengling is the nation’s oldest brewery, and if tomorrow they learned that Gen-Z would be going teetotal, they’d be the nation’s largest kombucha and sparkling water distributor by next year.