You are listening to the Take a Break podcast with Rachel Hart, episode 170.

Whether you want to drink less or stop drinking, this podcast will help you change the habit

from the inside out. We're challenging conventional wisdom about why people drink

and why it can be hard to resist temptation. No labels, no judgment, just practical tools

to take control of your desire and stop worrying about your drinking.

Now here's your host, Rachel Hart.

Well, hello everybody. I always get asked questions about where I come up with my ideas

for what I'm going to talk to you about on the podcast. I'm going to tell you they come from everywhere.

Literally everything in life, not just the women that I work with in the Take a Break program,

but they come from TV and they come from my family and they come from things that I see out in the world.

But today's idea came from a pretty unlikely place. It came from an email that I got from my financial advisor.

So my husband and I have a woman who advises us on her finances. She is unbelievable. We love her.

And she sent an email to all of her clients about her perspective on what is happening in the economy right now.

And I was reading through it because of course I want to be on top of my finances and I want to take it seriously.

So I really believe very much in paying attention to everything that she sends me.

And I was kind of taken off guard because all of a sudden I got to align in her email and it said,

no wonder alcoholic beverages, sales rose 55% the last week of March compared to 2019. We are coping.

And you know, I wasn't expecting to have her reference drinking in this email, but I was so fascinated not only by the percentages that she was citing in this email,

but also her kind of summation of what it meant, which was we are coping.

So I did a little research into the background and turns out she's totally right. So the market research firm, Nielsen, reported that sales of alcohol in the US rose by 55% in the week ending March 21st.

So this was right after a couple states issued the very first state home orders, but it gets even more interesting because they also noted that online sales of alcohol are up 243%.

So it's a huge jump from last year. Now what struck me was not only the increase, which I've talked about on this podcast before, how people are kind of using what's happening out in the world in the pandemic and COVID and using that as a justification to drink more.

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