The Social Economics of the Drink Package

Or: What do you give the person who already has everything?

Last year I spent $285.65 on cruise booze.

This year, although I won’t be able to give you the exact figure because I don’t have my payment summary from Royal Caribbean yet, I spent significantly less on cruise booze. I think I spent less than $150, although that’s me doing a bunch of math in my head and I could be forgetting something.

My drinking habits did not change. This year I stuck primarily to Bellinis instead of drinking innumerable B-52s, which I’d like to say represents a maturation of my tastes except for the part where I saw the bartender pour peach goo out of a cardboard carton. (Essentially, I traded one viscous sugar liquid for another.)

But I still drank between two and three drinks a day.

What I didn’t do was buy drinks for other people.

Royal Caribbean, like many cruise lines, offers a Drink Package. (Technically, multiple drink packages.) If you purchase a Drink Package, you pay a daily fee for the privilege of being able to drink as many Package Drinks as you want. There are a few fine-print details in there, like “if you choose a wine that costs more than $X, you pay a little extra,” but in general a Drink Package lets you pay in advance and then order as many Bellinis or Manhattans or Irish coffees as you can stomach.

I can only stomach about three-and-a-half drinks before I get sick. Which means it is never financially advantageous for me to purchase the Drink Package, which is calibrated under the assumption that you’ll drink at least four drinks per day—or, more specifically, that you’re throwing money away if you don’t drink at least four drinks per day.

But this year enough of my friends bought the Drink Package that we stopped playing the game of “who’s buying the next round of drinks.” If you had a Drink Package, after all, your next drink had already been paid for.

I still had a few drinks purchased for me, but it made absolutely no economic sense for me to return the favor. Turning to someone with a Drink Package and saying “I’ve got the next one” would be laughably wasteful, and we all knew it.

It made me think how rare it was to see these kind of financial boundaries in our lives. There are so many situations in which friends and family members buy things for each other, and there are all kinds of emotions and social expectations tied into who buys what for whom, and the Drink Package just eliminates all of that.

It was kind of delightful.

I mean, I missed being able to treat my friends, because there’s joy in being able to treat your friends. But there’s also this joy in knowing that, at least within the context of “drinks on a cruise ship,” the people with the Drink Package already have everything they need. You can’t contribute to the social value of the evening by saying “let me buy the next round.” The only way you can add social value is by being yourself.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had been in that kind of situation. Maybe in college, when we all had meal plans, even though we still took turns buying drinks or throwing in for pizza.

It makes me want to buy a Drink Package next year, even though I know I’d never drink enough to make it worth it. I just love the idea of everyone at the table already having everything money can buy, so we can focus instead on sharing the wealth of each other.

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