Oh I don’t disagree that a lot of the bigger and corporate owned distilleries were doing it for the marketing, booze is a billion dollar industry.

When covid hit though, I was manager of a whisky bar and in close contact with a lot of the small batch/craft distilleries around Australia, and knew a lot of the distillers personally. The ones I know of that did switch to hand sanitizer were so small that it was literally an Instagram post to explain why their products weren’t currently available. That was the extent of the marketing. They were literally just producing enough to give a weekly supply to the local hospitals so they didn’t run out entirely before supply was back up.

The hand sanitizer was earning the distilleries less money, they didn’t have to do that. A lot of them also donated to the hospitals and people in charge of doing the covid tests before we had the at home ones. The toilet paper was capitalism as usual though.

It was probably the toilet paper thing. Nothing has happened like that since then. Also they fail to point out we increased toilet paper production when it first became a problem and was solved very quickly. Similar to how all our craft distilleries switched to making hand sanitizer instead of booze when the hospitals were on short supply… Which isn’t quite how capitalism usually works so 🤷‍♂️