In many old movies, the main character will be at his office and there will be a bar present. Another character will enter and they’ll have a drink together. This is often in the daytime. Was this ever really common in the business world? Is it common anywhere in the world today? Even a drink at lunch, in most companies, is completely forbidden. I can’t imagine a fully stocked bar. However, I don’t hang out in CEO’s suites often.
People in the U.S. used to have way more liberal attitudes towards drinking, especially hard alcohol, than they do today. Offering guests hard alcohol was common especially in the 1940’s through early 1960’s. I can easily believe that executives might have kept hard alcohol in their offices during that time. Another factor would be that business meetings would have much more good-ole-boy. It is only pretty recent that our society’s attitudes towards alcohol have changed towards little tolerance. Drunk driving was not a very big offense in most states prior to the 1980’s and the police weren’t very likely to bust you for it at all even if they caught you. It was also legal to “drink and drive” in many states up until the last couple of decades. That meant driving around with a cold beer or something like it. People didn’t usually think much of it.
I don’t get the impression that a drink at lunch is forbidden per se, but it obviously is to return from lunch incapacitated through drink.
Yes, it did use to be much more common. Read The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit; it seems that two- or three-martini lunches were par for the course, and these were working lunches. People did seem to drink more, generally, in the 1950s. I get the impression that the decade was one long cocktail party, perhaps as a comp for the years of privation, first during the Depression and then during wartime rationing.
I should add that I have read to non-fiction books from the period including some about business and attitudes about drinking to seal business deals and it did seem common and accepted.
Isn’t there also a scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, where Dustin Hoffman is drinking a glass of wine in his office, while working on his presentation?
Sorry, one more thing. I have never worked at a white-collar job where it is “forbidden” to drink during lunch. Doing it often and to excess may be a problem but not for a celebration lunch or something. Still, most people don’t do it but some do. Some offices in the Boston area have beer get-togethers on Thursday or Friday afternoon.
I worked for a Japanese trading company from 1995 to 1998. A lot of the attitudes were left over from the 1960s (and it was fun!).
We had beer at lunch sometimes when we were meeting with clients, etc. Of course we ate out with clients at night all the time and everyone got trashed. Then there were times we went out just ourselves and, of course, got trashed.
When working overtime we would also sometimes drink beer at work.
The good ole days!
At the last place I worked the CEO had a bar in his office. There’s bar in the boardroom at my current employer.
This certainly isn’t the case in Australia. People drink alcohol (generally wine) at office lunches. Alcohol is served at “official” lunchtime functions.
My wife works for a fairly sizable corporation at which it is forbidden to have alcohol during work hours. I don’t think this practice is anywhere near universal, but I also don’t think it’s rare.
The attitudes toward alcohol changed radically during the 2000s. Even during the 1990s, hard drinking often accompanied deal-making. (Check out Stanley Bing’s 1998 novel Lloyd–What Happened: A Novel of Business for hilarious corporate hi-jinks of the day.) I think the dot.com bust and subsequent retrenching on all levels of business created a swift backlash to the perceived looseness, hedonism, and abandon of that era.
Drinking not only used to be one of the perks of high office, but a sign that you were a real man.
Not everything was better about the past.
In the dot com boom it was fairly common for me to see beers in the office on Fridays or late at night. One place had a beer wagon that came around Friday’s around 5:00. Now, I see it a bit less but we often have beer in the office and having a drink at lunch is no big deal at all.
I can’t help wonder how much further the strictness will go. Will bars be closed down and restaurants no longer allowed to serve if people drive to get to them? Will it finally be decided that my wine with dinner is socially too dangerous to afford? It’s disquieting to think how much more successfull a second try at prohibition could be, given modern surveillance techniques and people’s willingess to sacrifice freedom for safety.
It may also be a cultural holdover of Prohibition. The great experiment ended but some of its cultural baggage held on. One of these was keeping a bottle nearby, since there were no real bars.
Having liquor on hand was a luxury, a sign of a good connections (if not wealth) and a good host.
Not entirely sure how representative or relevant it is. . .
The recent sitcom SportsNight was about a tv show (called SportsNight, like ESPN’s Sports Center). The managing editor of the show had a nice, wood-paneled office, which also had a bar in it, and he frequently had a drink as he was working.
Again, not sure how relevant, but I figure it’s got to have been based at least loosely in real life.
Soo… What are you saying? :dubious:
That’s true, and I didn’t think of it. Many senior executives during the 1950s, almost all of them middle aged and elderly men, must have remembered the Prohibition era very well. What’s different now, though, IMO, is the notion that we must rein ourselves in in order to remain alert and competitive, and that was a Prohibitionist attitude–the notion that a couple of drinks won’t hurt, much, but since it affects you at all, why have them?
I don’t want to come across as advocating drunken driving, but I also have to wonder where the outcry about all the carnage was, say, in 1963, and hence why we were in such desperate need of stricter laws beginning around 1980. Granted, I was five years old in 1963, so maybe the outcry was there and I didn’t know about it. But when you think about the flight to the suburbs and the increased need for driving in nearly all walks of life, you’d think there’d have been Congressional hearings on the massive drunken driving problem, given the amount that people appear to have been drinking at that time.
Not that it has a lot to do with what is going on (well slightly…)
I used to work in technology sales and we were by this bar that had $2.00 margaritas on the rocks on Tuesdays. The slogan was, “Ten bucks will f’ you up!”
We always went for lunch.
Sometime in the 1950s, my father had a small batch of faux “books” made up as Christmas gifts to his best clients. Each one resembled a thick leatherette-bound book titled “When Everything Goes Wrong” with Dad’s name as the author. When you opened it up, there were cutouts for a pint of whiskey and two shot glasses. I still have a couple of them.
I work for a Crown corporation (Government owned company) in BC Canada.
We have a little room (a locked closet) beside the Presidents office, and it has a mostly stocked bar (Rye, Scotch, Rum and Vodka). But I think these bottles only get used once or twice a year and are probably close to 10 years old!
It’s also pretty common to have a drink at lunch, my manager knows and doesn’t seem to care. If we are meeting with external people (and they are paying) and we go to lunch, alcohol is never ordered.
Talking to the people who have been here for 20 years, the “good ole days” of the mod to late 80’s sounded crazy here. On St. Patricks day they would bring in green beer to the cafeteria. They would have pizza and beer days once or twice a month.
When I started in 97, there was none of that. However over the past 2 years there have been 4-5 corporate events that have given out free drinks (1-2 per person).
Anyway just my 2 drachmas…
MtM
Another thing to think about: Salesmen used to drink with each client they saw. Imagine doing two shots of bourbon seven times in a workday, plus lunch. Then it’s time for happy hour!
Engineer-type white collar slave here: not only do we frequently drink at lunch when we go out, but it is not uncommon for a manager, if one is present, to spring for a pitcher or two of beer. We don’t get “hammered” mind you; a two beer lunch is generally the extent of the damage, but the old hands lament the passing of the salad days in which the entire engineering and business staff would go out for lunch at 10:45a, drink their lunch until 2:00p, come back and pass out in their cars.
We’re technically not allowed to have alcohol on the premises, but the oenophiles among us (including my future boss) frequently bring in bottles to trade; I broke open a case of HP Cork Dancer and gave a bottle each to several wine drinkers there. And while we can’t have alcohol at company functions, there’s no one policing you if you duck off to the bar and get a drink or a few; at the Employee Appreciation Party (wink wink) a couple of hundred dollars appeared from nowhere and was utilized to purchase pitchers of beer for the tables. (Thanks, Director.) Unfortunately, the secretary in charge of procurement decided the money would best be spent on Lite beer, and worse yet, it turned out to be Coors Lite…so I bought a couple of pitchers of Down Town Brown and Alaskan Amber, and another guy bought a couple of pitchers, and so forth, and so a good time was had by all.
At the consluting startup I worked for back in the Second Millenium, we had a beer fridge, and no complaint was made if I brought in a six-pack of Lienie’s Red and had one with lunch. Of course, one of the owners would go to lunch hour at the bar across the street, then come back and pass out on his couch, so you can imagine how long that company lasted.
I always wanted an office with a big wooden bookcase so I could hide my bar behind a sliding panel of fake bookspines, but I don’t think I could handle three years of law school and practice as a patent lawyer without cracking up. I’d probably do better as the private dick who sleeps on his couch, wears the same suit every day, and drinks a whiskey shooter to wake up in the morning.
Stranger