Word: whiskeys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bootleggers, highjackers and just plain thirsty visitors from the drought areas finally dried up the wet areas too. Minneapolis and St. Paul ran out of whiskey because bootleggers bought up the local supply and smuggled it to Seattle, where parched citizens gladly paid up to $8 a pint. In Washington, D.C., organized '"booze-buyer" gangs stripped store shelves of liquor for resale in Virginia and Maryland. Legal whiskey outlets ran out of stock in the states bordering Prohibitionist Mississippi (where OPA officials are "utterly powerless" because "theoretically there is no whiskey in Mississippi"). Even liquorish Manhattan scraped the bottom...
...sales of liquor at prices above ceilings; 2) pressure-sales of wine, sherry, raw Cuban gin or Puerto Rican rum before any whiskey conies out from under the counter. In Los Angeles retailers frantically tried to switch their customers.from bour bon to tequila, which was flooding across the border because it sells for $1 a fifth in Mexico...
Retailers blamed wholesalers for their troubles, wholesalers blamed distillers, and distillers blamed the public for: i) supporting black markets, 2) refusing to switch from whiskey to relatively plentiful drinks. "The public is behaving very badly about the liquor situation," moaned a Hiram Walker man in Chicago. "When they go to a store and can't get butter, they realize there's a war on. But when they can't get whiskey, they raise hell...
Statistics & Suspicions. One big reason the public behaved badly was that the distilling industry, trying to stem the panic, has stressed statistics that seem to prove that the U.S. has up to a four-year supply. On Sept. 30, the U.S. had 406,000,000 gal. of whiskey in stock v. 1942!s consumption of around 92,000,000 gal. That is all there will be until war's end and then some, since whiskey makers are 100% converted to the manufacture of industrial alcohol...
...will disappear in "shrinkage" and evaporation before it gets bottled, another 100,000,000 gal. is being held as a last-ditch reserve for blending with new stocks, come peace. And around one-third of the remaining 200,000,000 gal. is not yet two years old. Whiskey consumption is at the rate of 87,000,000 gal. a year...