OPINION: "Calm down Mum, what could be wrong with a few beers in the sun with friends?" But 12 beers in as many hours? Sarah Daniell on the relatively recent but enduring tradition that is Crate Day – and why she loathes it.
It’s officially the first weekend of summer and to celebrate it, many young people in Aotearoa will be getting lit in a rite of passage birthed in 2009 by a commercial radio station. Crate Day. The goal: neck 12, 745ml bottles between noon and midnight. It’s six o’clock closing take two: sanctioned inebriation within a specified time frame.
New Zealand bathes itself not in glory but alcohol, and then it throws up on the lawn.
History - as in news reports from this time last year - tells us that hospitals will see double the admissions of alcohol related harm in people in their 20s and 30s to emergency departments, stretching already compromised capacity and resources. A study in the New Zealand Medical Journal reported 72 per cent of the alcohol-related presentations related to Crate Day at Waikato Hospital ED were men.
There’ll be a spike in arrests and injuries. DOC will be on alert around the riverbeds of Te Waipounamu after last year when 70 4WDs drove through nesting areas of the endangered tarapiroe (black-fronted terns), decimating eggs.
Not everyone will get totalled and cause mayhem. Not everyone will be like the fool on a farm in Taranaki who posted on Facebook that he was going to put a miniature horse on a spit. Some, maybe many, will partake by just having a beer or three with friends. But the essence of Crate Day isn't moderation, it's sickening excess.
Let’s start with the objectively tragic name. Crate Day. It is what it says, and in that sense could be called a marketing triumph. It has certainly lingered, like a really bad hangover. Or a lascivious creep following you around in a bar buying you shots. How and why are we still here, 15 years on, when the commercial radio station that started it won’t even touch it? Having launched Crate Day back in 2009, the station no longer promotes the day. Unfortunately it no longer needs promoting.
'But it's just a few cold ones'
“I f***ing hate Crate Day,” said my friend when I rang her this week to lament the imminent C Day. Her son is in his late teens, like mine. It’s not their first time. She and her boy couldn’t even talk about it. “It’s like having a conversation with a MAGA person and you’re in the Democrats.”
Her son is heading up north to mark the occasion. Mine will be heading to a friend’s front lawn. My daughter is working but says she’ll visit friends who’ll be pretty chill and they won’t abide by the goal of sinking 12 in 12.
Why the fuss? It’s just a few cold ones in the sun, bro. That would be fine if it were true except statistically we know it’s not.
Flora Apulu is a social worker and lecturer and works with rangatahi in youth justice. I asked her, is it just a harmless day of gathering with friends?
“Crate Day isn’t just a party,” she says, “it’s a marketing machine that normalises excessive drinking. It’s setting young people up for harm and embedding dangerous habits into New Zealand’s social fabric.
“For rangatahi, binge drinking is about fitting in. The problem is, these behaviors don’t stay in the past – they shape their future and set them up for long-term health risks.”
Risking health to connect with others
At the heart of it, says Apulu, is the need for connection and drinking has become a shortcut to that connection. “The challenge is shifting this narrative and showing them they don’t need to risk their health to belong.”
The stats show progress in reducing youth drinking, but binge drinking remains a glaring issue and it’s glamorised by Crate Day.
“It’s not just about having a good time, it’s about creating a culture where connection doesn’t rely on alcohol,” she says.
Young people are still finding their place in the world and alcohol fills that gap for many. says Apulu. "When events like Crate Day push binge drinking as a way to belong, it’s time to step back and ask, ‘At what cost?’”
Drinking in Aotearoa, especially in student culture, is framed as heroic. But an 18-year-old’s brain is still metamorphosing and won’t fully develop for another seven years. Alcohol is like the Olympic pole-vaulter of substances – leaping past the blood-brain barrier in less than five minutes from consumption. Which is why young people are vulnerable to alcohol poisoning and have a propensity to do dumb sh**. Plus the long-term toll on physical and mental health can be devastating.
The young people who are in my life, have jobs, are musicians, are doing apprenticeships or are at university and they’re smart, creative, critical thinkers. So why slavishly attach to a day-drinking marketing legacy? Celebrate on your own terms and step away from the crate – unless it’s an upcycled bedside shelf in your student flat.
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