The Champagne corks no longer pop at Dubai’s infamous alcohol-soaked brunches. The blaring flat-screen televisions stand silent in the sheikhdom’s sports bars. And the city-state’s pubs have shrink-wrapped their now-idle beer taps.
This skyscraper-studded desert metropolis on the Arabian Peninsula has long been one of the wettest places in West Asia in terms of alcohol consumption, its bars and licensed restaurants serving tourists, travellers and its vast population of foreign workers.
Up until the global coronavirus pandemic, that is. With the virus now threatening a crucial source of tax and general revenue for its rulers, Dubai’s two major alcohol distributors have partnered to offer home delivery of beer, spirits and wine, yet another loosening of social mores in this Islamic city-state.
“Luxury hotels and bars have been the worse impacted within the sector and this had a direct impact on the alcohol consumption ... in the United Arab Emirates,” said Rabia Yasmeen, an analyst for market research firm Euromonitor International.
Maritime and Mercantile International, a subsidiary of the government-owned Emirates airline known as MMI, and African & Eastern partnered to create the website offering home delivery. Its products range from a $530 bottle of Don Julio 1942 Tequila to a $4.30 bottle of Indian blended whisky, with beers and wines in between.
Their website legalhomedelivery.com, a nod towards the online bootleggers long operating in the grey margins of Dubai, describes the service as needed “in these unprecedented times”.
Tourists, the few remaining here, can use their passports to buy the alcohol. Residents, however, need an alcohol license, a plastic red card issued by Dubai police that requires annual renewal. Only non-Muslims 21 and older can apply for a licence — though bartenders across the city never check for them before pouring drinks.
Text-message alerts give imbibers a predicted delivery time within a few hours, though a crew showed up some six hours early for one delivery on Tuesday, wearing masks and disposable gloves.
Officials at African & Eastern, a private company believed to be at least partially held by the state or affiliated firms, and MMI both acknowledged that the pandemic will likely affect their revenues for the year. Most of their physical stores also remain open, though Dubai now is under a 24-hour lockdown that requires the public to have police permission to go to the grocery store.
“We are in the early days of the service and interest has been high already,” Mike Glen, MMI’s managing director for the UAE and Oman, told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.
Glen and Sean Hennessey, African & Eastern general manager for UAE and Oman, declined to offer any sales statistics to the AP. Hennessey also declined to say who owned African & Eastern.
A push to keep alcohol shops open during the pandemic may be surprising to some, especially as drinking is illegal in the neighbouring emirate of Sharjah and the nations of Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
But alcohol sales long have been a canary in the coal mine — or in this case, the cocktail lounge — for the wider economy of Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms in the UAE.