In the old days of the Air Force (prior to the 1990s)....booze on a base was sold at two locations (your local 'club' or the Class-6 store). The club sold drinks....the Class-6 store was the place to buy it in bottle form.
To describe a Class-6 shop? It would be typically like any beverage shop that you'd walk into today, with ultra-cheap prices. If you were off-base and found a bottle of 'X' for $6....Class-6 would probably sell it for $5.
From the 1950s to the 1990s....Class-6 survived (actually thrived).
In the 1990s...the BX-folks came along and said they could do a better job, and the Class-6 empire was dissolved.
What you figured out five years later...was that the $6 a bottle of 'X' off-base.....via the new BX shop....was now about $5.90 for the same bottle. Yeah, this became a much discussed topic.
Occasionally, you'd walk in and find some case of beer on sale, and the discount made sense. But you had to view each week of what was coming up on sale, and only buy when discounted prices were in effect.
But the BX went and changed things in an odd way as 2000 came around. The shopette gimmick was invented, a 24-hour shop came up out of thin air. I was retired at this point, but young enlisted guys would talk about going over at midnight....to buy X and Y. This was something that 1970s/1980s enlisted guys weren't into.
This week, I noticed that the BX-management had gone to another modification....saying there were too many suicides on bases....with people buying booze after 10 PM. So there is a new being established....the 24-hour operation will still continue, but you can't buy any beer, wine, or booze....from 10 PM to 6 AM. No one really caring? Well....they had to admit that in normal operations....booze sales from 10 PM to 6 AM....only amounted to 1-percent of the booze sales. Yeah.....99-percent of booze/beer sales occurs from 6 AM to 9:59 PM
This brings me back to the odd factor....guys committing suicide after dark (mostly from midnight to 4 AM). No one says booze or drugs are involved, but this BX decision makes you wonder about this.
Folks just readjusting to the time change, and rush over between 9 and 10 PM....to buy beer or booze? Well....yeah, people tend to adjust. The other factor? If you needed booze or beer....why limit yourself to the BX-management situation?
