Handling drunken holiday crowds is a challenging inevitability in our industry. Days like St. Patricks Day, Cinco de Mayo and New Year’s Eve can bring massive crowds of imbibers to your bar. Often, these are groups of people who have already been drinking elsewhere, and it can be hard to tell how much they’ve had already. This can be a dangerous challenge when you are extra busy with the high volume of customers and your awareness is lower. So how do we survive these crazy drinking holidays?
My guest today is barman Eddie Chann. He has worked in the hospitality industry for more than eight years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eddie is no stranger to big crowds of drunken revelers. In addition to all of the usual holidays, one of Eddie’s former bars, Blind Tiger in Oakland, Calif., was a popular bar crawl destination during the monthly First Friday event.
Eddie shared some great advice about how good communication, careful observation of your coworker’s movements, practiced efficiency and how simply slowing down a little bit when something bad happens can help you get through even the toughest and craziest crowds.
Check out our conversation in the player to learn about Handling drunken holiday crowds, and don’t forget to hit subscribe and check out our homepage for more. We have new conversations every week, so stay tuned. Also, if you want to get some holiday shopping out of the way, we’ve got new items in the shop. I’ll see you next time!
I’ve always found it ironic that our business is to sell people alcohol, but we also have to make sure they don’t get too drunk. We want them to buy more so we make more money, but we can’t sell them too much because it causes problems—The worst being that they will kill themselves or someone else. The drunker they get, the more childish they become, and have you ever tried to tell a child they can’t have more of something they want? It doesn’t go well. At least children are tiny and tire easily. Drunk adults have a much greater capacity for bullshit and it falls on us bartenders to deal with it.