According to Beluga Group - a Russian beverage company - alcohol sales have gone up by 6.8% in 2022 with heavier alcohol like vodka seeing the largest sales. This reverses a trend of decreasing consumption of alcohol in the last few years in Russia.
Alcohol use is about the only thing in the Russian economy that is on the rise...
@DotardTed
> trend of decreasing consumption of alcohol
I always found it hard to believe, they use really weird methods to count and it's a decrease in *legal* alcohol consumption. Moscow is hardly the poorest region, but even here moonshine has seen a massive resurgence.
Alcohol is either too expensive or low-quality. I'm buying cheap German beer now — it's shit, but it's still better than most local stuff and at least cans are 0,5 litre, not 0,42 or something like that.
@don@liberdon.com @useless_idiot
@DotardTed
With strong alcohol it's even more complicated — cheap imported stuff is just as bad as local, there are a few local brands of vodka that manage to have highest standards of quality, but keep the prices affordable, but they aren't well-known, not widely available, thus not popular.
@don@liberdon.com @useless_idiot
@DotardTed
For people living in poverty it's way worse, they went for alcohol that's not even intended to be consumed as beverage, like alcohol-containing lotions, so-called «фунфырики», there was a well-known case a few years ago in Siberia when over 50 people got poisoned with technical alcohol.
@don@liberdon.com @useless_idiot