It’s my understanding that for most of the 20th century, people in American cities drank a lot. It wasn’t necessarily that they’d be sitting down and getting hammered in one sitting; more that they’d be consistently drinking alcohol throughout the day. My mom told me that her father’s workplace (an ad agency in New York in the 1960s) had a bar and that men were regularly drinking during work. Watch episodes of old TV shows, whether it’s Twilight Zone or Starsky and Hutch, and you’ll see that bottles of Scotch in the office were commonplace, as were cocktails in the home during any social visit.
At some point, this ended. Nowadays you’re thought of as an alcoholic and deviant if you drink during the day, outside of a beer with lunch at a restaurant. I doubt many offices have bars in them. One place I worked at a few years ago, there would occasionally be beers in the office, and there was a bottle of whiskey in the freezer, but they were for special occasions, not used regularly.
What caused the change, and when exactly did it happen?
Interesting question. I don’t have an answer but I suppose that one big cause of the change was when some employers banned lunchtime alcohol. I work for the govt and cannot have a beer with my lunch. Or any time I’m at work, really. Booze in the office is specifically banned. Insurance liability could well be a part of it.
Remember Bewitched? Not one episode went by without Sam making Darren at least one cocktail, and usually more. And Darren frequently went to his club to have a few.
It was during the huge social shift of coming off of the hedonism of the 70’s and into the Reagan years. MADD was founded the same year that Reagan was elected. “Just Say No” followed shortly afterward. People were worried about ‘Japan Inc.’ and someone pointed out the austerity of Japanese CEO’s offices. Lavish executive offices rapidly fell out of favor. It trickled down from there.
I’m actually surprised to hear that, as it’s my understanding that the culture of Japanese salarymen is totally saturated with alcohol, and that their executives live like emperors.
Not providing my own input but tacking on a question, how much did the American suburban car culture and new stats on drunk driving accidents also contribute to the reduction of casual alcohol consumption during the day?
Can’t speak for Japan, but when I worked in Hong Kong, alcohol was for business entertainment in the evening and never during the day.
Also, the later you were out drinking with the boss, the earlier and more ‘together’ you were expected to be in the office the next day. It was torture.
The first time I went out with my boss, he ended up starting a food fight and puking in the toilet and I had to smooth everything over with the restaurant. The next day he was in the office before eight. I came in at eight thirty and like a good Brit, was all like “wahey, you were soooo drunk last night ahahahah!”
“No I wasn’t,” he replied with a stony look and didn’t speak to me again that day.
And that was that. I learned my lesson and drunken hijinks were never mentioned again in any context at all.
In my experience, it was MADD and the crackdown on drunk driving. I worked at Hewlett Packard in 1980 as my first job out of college, and in the 15 months I worked there, we had about 6 keggers in the courtyard of building 2. Although I never heard of any one getting in an accident, there were certainly people who were probably over the 0.1% blood alcohol limit that was the standard at the time. I’m pretty sure that this was common throughout the silicon valley.
Nearly every Friday, we’d go out to some bar for lunch and have pitchers of beer. The Old Pro, the Oasis, and the Alpine Inn were all mainstays for us.
At the other companies I worked at during the 80’s, it was certainly no big deal to have a couple of beers at lunch.
Japanese executives make significantly less than their American counterparts. Despite being the world’s second or third largest economy, Japan has always lacked noticeable numbers of billionaires.
When was this? In the 80’s and through most of the 90’s it was not at all uncommon for the Brits to have a few pints at lunch. No one batted an eye during the 80’s but they definately became a minority in the 90’s. Of course, I worked in publishing in the 80’s and investment banking sales in the 90’s, so that might have been a skewed group.
I saw a show on the History Channel a while back that said for most of human history, up til a few hundred years ago, most people on earth walked around drunk most of the time, including children…the reason was that people knew nothing about germs and how it could pollute water and make you sick if you drank it, all they knew was that sometimes when they drank water, say from a spring or well, they didn’t get sick, but other times, like when they drank from a stagnant pond or fecal-filled river or lake, they did get sick…they also knew that when they drank beer or wine or liquor they didnt get sick, unless they drank too much and got really stinkin’ drunk and puked or whatever…they had no idea the bacteria filled water made them sick but the beer/wine/spirits didn’t because the water or liquid in it was boiled at some point in the process, killing the germs…so people didn’t want to take chances drinking water so they all drank wine or beer or liquor or really cheap booze called mead…so that would explain some of the wacky decisions made throughout history–everyone was drunk…would explain things such as rasputin, manhattan for four bucks an acre and cortez burning his ships
The law enforcement agency I retired from after 25 years also had a policy of “no testable amount of alcohol” while on duty.
However… over the last 30 years I’ve worked for some police departments on a part-time basis to make extra money. And, believe it or not, some of them actually had in their written policies (for those of you that don’t know ALL law enforcement agencies are required to have written policies pertaining to EVERYTHING from pursuits, use of force, to off duty behavior) that officers were not to have more than two (2) alcoholic beverages during an 8 hour shift.
I’m not kidding. Maybe it’s a Wisconsin thing, but there are still police and fire departments here that allow some drinking on duty. I had one Chief give me a King Can while on duty and slur “The rule doesn’t say how big the beverage can be”. BTW, he wrote the policy.
Some of the change was due to union contracts, oddly enough.
Way back in the late 1980’s, working with Burlington Northern Railroad, this was true.
The company had cracked down on drinking by railroad workers, especially engineers & switchmen. (IMO, easier to blame accidents on drunken workers than spend money on maintenance of old equipment & tracks, but …) Reasonable rulea, you don’t want the engineer controlling a heavy, fast-moving train to be drunk while working.
The union countered by asking why was it OK for a company executive to be making multi-million dollar decisions while drunk after a 3-martini lunch (paid for by company expense account, no less)? So they demanded that the same rules regarding alcohol consumption at work be applied to ALL employees. So they were.
And the rules were pretty strict. Being ‘under the influence’ on the job could get you fired, even for a first offense. We were specifically told that if we had been at lunch and had too much to drink, you should clock out and go home early – you’d get in less trouble for that than for staying at work.
I was born in 1957 so I am not sure what was truly common in the 1960s workplace but I am betting that a New York ad agency in the 1960s does not represent a cross-section of the nation’s workplaces. I would also not use TV shows to gather historical fact. I would think that in most cases where alcohol in the office was portrayed in a show like Twilight Zone is to create an atmosphere of decadence, or arrogance, or to signal that the person is so important that they can do whatever they want in their office, rather than to depict a typical, everyday office. In *Lost *a few years ago, Widmore showed off an extremely expensive bottle of scotch and I think the scene was in his office, but this was to signal how powerful he was, especially in contrast to Desmond, to whom he made the point that Desmond was not good enough to drink his scotch (nor marry his daughter).
Another influence in the corporate world was Thomas Watson Sr.'s conservative policies at IBM, which forbade alcohol (even at out-of-office lunches).
Alcoholic drinks were a dietary staple in the medieval world, but that doesn’t mean they were all drunk. Small beer contains very little alcohol, and wine was typically mixed with water.
When I started working in service 30 yrs ago, 3 martini lunches were par for the course. Working men drank beer with their lunches, often 2 or more. When the first of December rolled around, it was on, people socialized and drank, lunch through to late night. And then drove home.
The drunk driving laws were a big change up, but even that was just the out come of a changing perspective on alcohol consumption. People no longer felt, “Well, he was drunk.” to be mitigating any more, quite the reverse.
Today, I don’t see many 3 martini lunchers, and then people going back to work. And come December, people have one drink and switch to soda. There was a huge shift there, over the course of 20+ years.
15 yrs ago, I knew several people who lost their permits, for blowing over. Don’t know if it was the shifting, or just the right timing, age wise, for the group I was witnessing. I don’t hear of it as much now, people seem to have gotten the message. You will get caught, they will take your permit, and it will suck - LARGE.
As recently as the mid-80’s my colleagues and I always drank at lunch. In fact, we would only go to restaurants where we could get alcohol. And not just beer and wine-- margaritas (or two) were popular. When I look back on that, I’m astounded. It definitely is unthinkable now.
Actually, there was just a lot more drinking then among the people I knew than now. I certainly drank a lot then, during the day and evening, with others and alone. Now if I have two glasses of wine a month, that’s a lot.
