Lou's Official Notice That the Bar Just Charged You for the Ambiance (And the Ambiance Was a Broken Speaker and a Candle)
I have the receipt in front of me. I am not letting this go. This is a document I intend to frame, submit to a government agency, and read aloud at my own funeral so everyone understands what I was up against. This is the thc drinks vs alcohol cost argument, settled, by a man who does the math and does not calm down afterward.
Saturday night. Me, two guys I've known since before either of them had opinions, a bar that smelled like ambition and someone else's regret. Standard evening. We sat down, we ordered, we laughed, we ran up a tab. Fine. I've done it a thousand times. I know the deal.
But then the bill came.
The Line-by-Line Audit, Which I Am Conducting Because Nobody Else Will
Three drinks each. Nine drinks. Forty-one dollars and some change per person before tip. I'm doing the division in my head because I'm an accountant and this is what I do, even on a Saturday, even at a bar, even when the guy next to me is telling a story about a raccoon that I will never hear the end of because I am focused on a crime in progress.
Fourteen dollars. Per old fashioned. Each.
I know what's in an old fashioned. Whiskey, bitters, a little sugar, an orange peel if the bartender is feeling theatrical. It is a drink that was invented because people wanted whiskey and were polite about it. There is no universe, no economy, no alternate dimension in which fourteen dollars is the correct price for that transaction.
But fine. Fine. I've accepted the markup. That is the bar business. You are paying for the real estate, the license, the guy in the vest who calls himself a "mixologist" like he discovered fire. I have made my peace with that. Mostly.
What I have NOT made peace with is the line at the bottom of the receipt that says: Ambiance Fee: $3.00 per person.
I am going to need everyone to stop what they are doing.
The ambiance was a candle. One candle, burned down to a nub, sitting in a jar that used to have mustard in it. I know it had mustard in it because there was still a ghost of a label. And a speaker, mounted in the corner, playing something that I think was a song but could also have been a router malfunction, because it kept cutting out every forty-five seconds with a sound like a man stepping on a cat.
That was the ambiance. A mustard candle and a speaker with a condition. And they charged us three dollars each for it.
That is nine dollars. Nine dollars for a candle that cost them forty cents and a speaker they have clearly not fixed since the Obama administration. Nine dollars for the privilege of sitting in a room that smelled like other people's choices and could not maintain a Spotify playlist for longer than a minute at a time.
I flagged the waiter. The waiter said it was "standard now." Standard. He said that word to my face. I wrote it down.
What This Actually Costs You, Across a Year, If You Keep Going Back Like Nothing Happened
Let me do the math, because somebody has to.
If you go out twice a month, which is a conservative estimate for a person who still has a social life and has not yet fully committed to shouting opinions into a parking lot, you are spending somewhere in the neighborhood of one thousand dollars a year on drinks alone. Not food. Not the cover charge at the door that they now collect "for the DJ," who is a laptop on a stool. Just drinks.
Add the ambiance fee. Add the "service charge" that is different from the tip, apparently, which is a legal concept I intend to challenge. Add the ice. And yes, I am bringing up the ice. You are paying for ice. Ice is frozen weather. Weather is free. I am not subsidizing the bar's refrigeration costs. That is not my department.
And at the end of the night, you feel approximately how you feel after a long argument with someone who is wrong but has more energy than you. Not good. Not rested. A little embarrassed that you paid that much for something that is already bothering you at 7 AM the next morning.
Now compare that to what I've been doing, which is keeping a four-pack of Lou's Damn Right I'm Old Fashioned in the fridge at home. Eight milligrams of THC. Real old fashioned flavor, bitters, orange, oak, the whole thing. No vested gentleman hovering. No mustard-jar candle. No fee for the ambiance, because my ambiance is my own living room and it is free because I own it and everything in it, including the speaker, which works.
Sixteen ninety-nine for a four-pack. You do the math. I already did. It made me feel like a genius, which is a feeling the bar has never once given me, not even once, not at any price point.
The Part Where I Acknowledge There Are Other Options, Briefly, Before Returning to Being Furious
Look. I understand that some people have different tastes. Some people want an espresso martini. Some people want a cosmopolitan. I am not here to tell you what to drink. I am here to tell you that you are being financially exploited by a room with a candle problem, and there are alternatives.
If your people are the espresso martini crowd, there's Mary's M Train Double Espresso Martini, eight milligrams, no broken speaker required. If your crowd contains someone who considers themselves a cosmopolitan person, which is a whole other conversation, there's Jane's Fancy Shmancy Pomegranate Cosmopolitan, also eight milligrams, also in your fridge, also not charging you for the atmosphere of wherever you are sitting right now.
Or you can grab The Sample Can and figure out which one is yours before you commit. That is a reasonable thing to do. I respect that level of due diligence. It is not unlike auditing a bar receipt, which I am still doing, in my head, at all hours.
My Official Ruling
The thc drinks vs alcohol cost comparison is not complicated. You are either paying fourteen dollars for a drink in a room that charges you separately for the experience of being in that room, or you are not. Those are your two options. One of them involves a speaker that works and no line item for a candle.
I have made my choice. It is in the fridge right now, if you want to try the experiment yourself. I will not be going back to that bar. Not because I am dramatic about it. Because I did the math.
The watch on my wrist stopped in 2009. It is right twice a day. That is a better track record than the bar's speaker, and nobody is charging me three dollars for it.
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