I mean give the reactionaries a little credit. The systembolaget by my house closes at 1500 on Saturdays. Come on.

It is a really reasonable deal to buy from there though often. Selection is pretty good and the taxes on beer and wine are less and as a result due to the flat markup you can get really good deals on fine wines and the like.

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cess11 2 days ago | parent [-]

The one where I live closes at 1400. I've never been bothered by that, if something social suddenly comes up that I'd like to be tipsy for I'd grab something I already have or buy some "people's beer". I.e. 2.8 or 3.5 percent alcohol, available at any grocery store, cornershop or petrol station, sometimes lovingly called "emergency rockets".

In my area it's also trivial to find both illegal vodka and legal beer people make at home, which is common outside the larger cities in Sweden. This compensates for the lack of greyzone importers from Germany and Denmark.

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impossiblefork a day ago | parent [-]

I think the big appeal for me with Systembolaget is actually their non-alcoholic alternatives.

You simply can't get anything of that level in a normal store. Dealcoholized Rieseling, Morello cherry juice, cider apple juice, etc.

	▲	SOLAR_FIELDS a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In general the NA game of Sweden (and Denmark) is incredible compared to many other countries. My understanding is that there is a law in Sweden that indicates that bars must offer non-alcoholic options and as such there's a pretty large market demand and opportunity for the popular craft breweries like Mikeller to come in and make awesome NA beer that the whole region gets to enjoy.
	▲	cess11 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, that's another perk. Service is typically very good as well, you can ask for advice and get decent, trustworthy answers beyond what shelf something is on. It's a quite different experience compared to regular profit optimised mass retail. Now, I'm very aware of the drawbacks for local producers. It's a bit tricky to get things onto the monopoly shelves, you can't have anything the least provocative or advert-like on the label and even if you're only going to sell through your local monopoly shop you still need to price in sending your bottles to a logistics hub in Örebro or wherever. This is surely annoying, but pretty much every monopoly shop has inventory from local smalltime craft brewers and distillers and the like anyway. As I see it, this is an unexploited business opportunity, one could likely live quite comfortably skimming a margin from small alcohol producers in exchange for lower transport costs and reliable advice in product design that shortens time to market.