Wastinglife

Yep, I had a rotation for a while but eventually I reached a point where I had no self-respect left and no longer cared about keeping up the facade of a occasional customer. The rotation made no sense anymore so I went to just one. However, I was refused service a few times if I had gone back a 2nd time in one day...a very low point for me.

Notmyrealname

As I was shopping at a dedicated liquor outlet, I didn't worry about my frequency of patronage. It's a liquor store -- I'm sure they had other frequent fliers who were less adept at managing their drunken antics than I was, and I know the owner appreciated the repeat business (plus he was often very red-eyed and I suspect drunk off his ass most of the time.. "game recognize game", as the young people say).

If I was regularly hitting a grocery store for booze where there was risk of attractive young female cashiers judging me, I might have approached that differently, I guess.

bluncain

Yeah, I too went to different supermarkets, and never bought just alcohol.
Organic veg. was one of my things, and was super aware of others just buying cheap booze. An alcoholic snob I guess.

When I gave up recently I went to my local small supermarket and the cashier asked "no wine today". He said sorry none of my business but you always buy wine. So much for covering my trail.

Incidentally I said it was New Year, his reply was how long will that last. MMM we shall see.

Jayelle113

Yes. I ALWAYS had it planned out too. I even knew which shifts the employees worked at each store so I could rotate around their schedules so maybe each person would only notice me buying booze once a week. How pathetic now that I think about it.

FreeOwl

yeah... but totally subconsciously. It didn't even occur to me how much I did that until someone talked about it in AA one day. Then I started looking back and realizing how frequently I'd change up the place I would go to grab booze....

so ridiculous.

DoPerdition

I was a bar manager so they were used to me coming in often for things for the restaurant. Our liquor stores are state run so there were very few options for shopping around.

EndGameNYC

That's actually somewhat hidden in the diagnostic criteria for alcohol dependence in the service of limiting the number of specifiers for each person with a drinking problem. The overall criteria include "persistent" or "continued" psychological distress, and most trained clinicians and research personnel will take into account things like shame, guilt, remorse, self-loathing...

This is further captured by a single criterion: "Continued drinking despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to be caused or exacerbated by drinking."