Cheers for looking up the stats. But I suppose there might be more to it than just "average price of booze". For instance, when I (in NL) need some quantity of (cheap) vodka for a party, it pays to get them from Germany where most hard liquor[0] is roughly half the price than it is in NL. Other stuff, like beer, is about the same.
[0] that isn't marked up for other reasons, such as Whiskey
Every once in a while, certain people in southern Sweden will go on a booze shopping spree in Germany. They'll drive south, take a ferry to one of the German coastal cities and fill their cars to the limits of what is legal (and oftentimes over that) from these so called border shops.
This is also common in the United States. A couple examples I'm familiar with:
- Pennsylvania has relatively strict laws regarding alcohol, so just over the Delaware border you'll find a lot of these "border shops" (although I haven't heard that word in the US);
- my wife was born in a dry county in Arkansas. Just over the county line (which happens to be the state border with Oklahoma) there are drive-through liquor stores. You can go, get your booze, and turn right around and go home.
This is still a thing, at least if the number of fireworks stores right at state lines are any indication. (I recently saw some along the Georgia-Tennessee border, although I can't remember which side they were on.)
It is even stranger in Texas, where the state says they are OK to sell at certain times of year but most large cities and towns prohibit them. Thus, you see seasonal roadside stands set up in unincorporated areas.
I have a friend in Denmark who told me he buys a danish beer from Germany and has it shipped to him in Denmark, because its cheaper. I thought that was pretty interesting in itself.
Finland has even more idiotic rules: microbreweries aren't allowed to sell their wares online. So they ship them across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia, which is way more liberal, and sell them online from there, which Finland can't prohibit thanks to EU free trade laws... and then the orders get shipped right back to Finnish buyers!
Remember though that this is tax fraud if you exceed certain quantities, while airline price discrimination is legal, so it's not quite the same thing :)
Are you sure of that? Certainly you can bring with yourself (for personal use) as much alcohol as you want across any EU border, and I'd be surprised if it became a fraud at some point just because it's shipped for you.
This kind of airline price discrimination, however, is not legal within the EU.
Swedes buy cheap booze from Finland.
Finns buy cheap booze from Estonia.
Estonians buy cheap booze from Russia.