Are Americans Really Drinking Less?

The surprising truth about alcohol sales data

Last week, while I was pulling together my thoughts on recent alcohol headlines for our Friday post, I got to chatting with my husband, Andrew, about what the big takeaways would be. As we talked about the surgeon general’s new cancer warning, he wondered aloud how necessary a warning like this really is today, when people are already increasingly turning away from alcohol, in large part because they see it as unhealthy. 

That’s certainly how it feels to the two of us. We’ve both found ourselves drinking less in recent years, family holidays have gotten notably less boozy, and I’ve spied non-alcoholic beers in the hands and inside the fridges of more and more friends. 

My media consumption, which is not down as much as my alcohol intake, has bolstered this sense that American culture is shifting toward more moderate drinking. For years I’ve read trend stories about this historic turn away from booze, features on the growing universe of N/A beverage brands, think pieces about Gen Z's wariness of alcohol, and reports on the “California sober” phenomenon.  

I myself rounded up the best zero-proof “spirits” for Businessweek in 2020, and all the way back in 2014, wrote about the rise of sophisticated mocktails for The Wall Street Journal — a story that confidently referred to “a culture of more measured alcohol consumption” taking hold. 

The thing is, that’s an incorrect — or at least incomplete — picture of what’s actually happening in America. Here’s why: