The Economics of the Booze Cruise

Jim Leitzel at Vice Squad posts up about the patterns of drinking in Finland based upon the availability of cheaper booze from Estonia. As I've mentioned before in numerous boring posts, I lived in Helsinki in the summer of 1996. One thing we (the other foreign interns and I) discovered was that it was possible to completely break even on the boat trip to Tallinn (Estonia's capital) if you bought enough booze to bring back with you. The difference in price between Finland and the former Soviet state was still so wide that Finns commonly took the boat trip over to stock up.

That summer, our group (mostly Brits, Americans, and Aussies) took two trips over, spent a night in Tallinn each time, and came back stocked with enough beer for the next few weeks or so. Everything was cheap, and we hung out all night at brand new clubs like Club Hollywood, an old Russian theater that had been converted to an American-style nightclub. Good times. There were limits to how much you could bring back, though, but on our first trip we wheeled a dolly stacked with cases of beer up to the customs booth and they just let us in - no problem.

Since that summer, Estonia has adopted the Euro and joined the EU, and it's interesting to study the patterns of drinking in Finland based upon the availability of cheaper booze from across the Gulf of Finland.