New Year Alcohol

It seems alcohol makes for a good New Year gift here. The second image is a part of the new liquor and tobacco section opened to the local super market for New Year. They already had a large wine and liquor section, but they built a new counter and set up a second larger area for gift packages.

The first image is of the gift boxed bottle sets available here. You can see the price ranges from modest to prohibitvely expensive, but what the image fails to fully capture is how beautiful some of the sets are. The sets usually include a bottle and a few glasses, or two bottles and two glasses. These are packed in boxes (wooden for the better sets) lined with cloth and come with gift bags to carry - they sets are ready gifts.

The bottle designs themselves vary a great deal but the best I saw was in the sub 500 RMB range, where the set had two glass bottles, both with a small glass ship inside, New Year wishes scribed on the sails. I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to take a photo, but the photos I did get should give you an idea. The whole concept goes way above and beyond anything I've seen in alcohol marketing before.

Cigarettes are another possible gift, and the second pic has cartons stacked upon cartons. The red cartons are actually the most expensive cigarettes sold in super markets, 40 RMB a pack. The counter of course has many other brands for sale too.

This is just a part of the shopping people do for their #1 holiday of the year, but you can trust me the markets are filled with snacks and candy. It's very similar to Finnish Christmas shopping, but the boxes of chocolate have been replaced with hard liquor. If this concept was implemented in Finland we would see a Christmas with statistics so grim people wouldn't complain about the lack of snow, but here it works.

OP Out.