Between 2005 and 2023, every time a new craft distillery opened in America, the postal service appears to have received several thousand more packages. The distilleries now number in the thousands, and USPS handles billions of packages annually, and if you look at the chart you will feel a powerful and irrational urge to ship a bottle of artisanal rye whiskey to someone. Statisticians have ruled out direct causation. They have not ruled out vibes.
Both trends are products of the same broad economic and cultural forces: the e-commerce explosion and the premiumization of consumer goods. Craft distilleries rode a wave of consumer demand for artisan, local, and 'authentic' products that accelerated through the 2010s, growing from a few hundred to over 9,000 US operations by 2023. USPS package volume surged in parallel as retail shifted online, particularly during the COVID-19 years of 2020-2021, which also happened to be a boom period for spirits sales. Both curves bend sharply upward in the same years for the same macroeconomic reasons.
Prosperity and leisure time breed both niche enthusiasms and the shipping infrastructure to sustain them. Two symptoms of the same cultural moment will always look, on a graph, like cause and effect.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “USPS package volume” vs “Craft distilleries in the US” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
