[brittohalloran]

Do you have any data on this? There are certainly heavy consumers but my (not data backed) feeling was that there's a fat tail - if there are thousands of high consumption binge drinkers then there are millions of casual "several drinks a week" drinkers that would dominate the actual dollars spent.

Also, unlike say internet bandwidth, there is actually a logistical limit to how much alcohol you could consume in a week, and it doesn't seem like it could be much more than 1 order of magnitude over the average casual consumer (3-4 drinks vs. 30-40 per week).

[tasty_freeze]

Washington Post had an article and a chart on it. The top decile has 74 drinks per week, way more than the bottom 90% combined.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...

[brittohalloran]

Unbelievable. Thanks. The top decile actually consume over 75% of the alcohol (by number of drinks, probably less by dollars)

[__s]

It shows up anywhere Zipf's Law shows up

http://academyofwinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...

[paulddraper]

Moreover, I would expect that heavy drinkers to purchase much cheaper alcohol than one-glass-of-wine-at-a-restaurant drinkers.