It’s a good observation. So many of the old TV shows, guy walks into the exec’s office, he gets offered a glass of Scotch. I’d never even thought about how unlikely that scenario is in the real world (+ present day).
My WAG would be mostly the drink-driving thing.
It’s not just that the laws got more strict; socially as well it became very unacceptable as people became more aware of the consequences.
And this awareness of the effect of alcohol, even small amounts, helped to make drinking at work seem very unprofessional.
There’s gigantic difference between these two examples.
In Lost, the alcohol is used specifically as a plot device to show status. In Twilight Zone it is a totally casual and innocuous background point, not unlike a magician’s “patter”.
Nowadays, I watch those reruns and comment, “I can’t believe how much they drank!” but when they were first aired, it raised nary an eyebrow. From this perspective, I think that they can indeed be used to learn some history – not about the pervasiveness of the actual drinking in the office, because one must not extrapolate from anecdotal evidence. But I think it is legitimate to conjecture about why the writers and producers included the drinking at all, and how they expected the audiences of the time to react; I presume that it was merely to establish the normalcy of the office, not to suggest that they were slobbering drunks.
It seems to coincide with the MADD and drunk driving crackdown. But other factors may be involved. As far as the executive martini environment, there was a great reduction in do-little white collar jobs of that nature, and cocktails were subsumed by beer, the national drink. Marijuana and other recreational drugs became more popular, and liability concerns caused companies to ban drinking on the job in any form. The fairness concept was often part of the workplace ban, as mentioned above, when the workers on the line weren’t allowed to drink, the prohibition often extended company wide. Parents were also dealing with growing teenage drinking problems and began to lock their liquor cabinets and set a better example for their kids. In the midst of the counter culture revolution many young parents deliberately set out to do things differently from their parents.
The “three-martini lunch” was actually a political issue from the 70s to the 90s. Wikipedia has a bit of info. The percentage of a business lunch that could be written off was reduced in 1986 and 1993.
An uncle of mine worked in the petroleum business in Canada for decades and he talks about how, up to the 1990s at least, when he took a group out to a business lunch, he could get in trouble if his receipt showed too little expenditure on alcohol. Because of that, when he was out, he would keep ordering rounds of drinks, even if they were left untouched on the table.
On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant kept a bottle in his desk, and apparently that was normal enough – at least for the hard-bitten newsman image – that no viewers complained. Although Mary didn’t quite get the concept; when Lou first asks her if she wants a drink, she says “Well, OK. I’ll have a Brandy Alexander.”
Ah, yes, journalism. When I started working in the 1990s, all the old-timers would talk about the glorious days of the 1970s, when every bottom drawer had a bottle of whiskey and a stack of porn magazines.
Someone told me once about his experience working at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where, every Christmas, every law firm and other bigwig in town would send crates of booze to the newsroom.
There was no porn or booze in the newsroom when I started, but I was there for the phase out of indoor smoking.
[thread drift] I think writers and producers try to influence the audience’s social values. 50’s and 60’s tv glamorized drinking. 70’s and 80’s tv glamorized drugs. Today, one can’t turn on the tv without seeing blood gore guts horror violence sex savagery sex rape murder and more sex. The audience slowly comes to accept it as normal. [/thread drift]
I think that’s completely backwards. TV reflects the values of the people of the time, especially in a “broadcasting” rather than a “narrowcasting” era. Up through the 1990s, all TV writers were trying to get the broadest acceptance possible, and the networks were very strict in enforcing rules to avoid offending people.
In today’s narrowcasting era, TV writers are even less likely to be trying to change their audiences rather than just serving the interests of their particular narrow demographic.
In the late 80’s early 90’s I worked for a smallish electronics company. In the early years it was common for someone to fetch a case of beer around 3pm on Friday afternoon. Often same deal if we were working late in the evening. The senior engineer kept a bottle of Wild Turkey in his desk, and would occasionally pour a round for the engineering staff.
All this was ended about 1992 by the then CFO due to liability concerns. Bastard ended up embezzling funds and disappeared about 6 months later. We also found he was getting a kickback from the health insurance provider. Actually, I think Bob still had the WT in his desk until he retired…just kept the drawer locked, it rarely came out, and would be poured into coffee mugs rather than plastic tumblers. Probably the worst kept secret in the company, though.
I don’t think that “casual daytime drinking” has become unacceptable. Who would even consider having a barbecue on Saturday afternoon without beer?
What has become unacceptable is drinking at work. I was born in 1958, and when I entered the professional world in the late 1970s, booze was quite common in offices. The boss often had a bottle sitting right out on the credenza, not hidden in a drawer. Friday afternoon beer bashes were pretty much standard in Silicon Valley back then. When we went out to lunch, everybody had a drink or two.
The transition that happened wasn’t for people to stay sober during the day, but to stay sober at work. We do have some stupid blue laws around the country, though. In many areas, day shift workers can get off work and have a drink, but night shift workers can’t.
I can’t speak to the porn magazines (or, if I can, I can say that I never saw any), but in 1985 at the first newspaper where I worked, there was an old hard-bitten type who definitely had a bottle in his drawer and he definitely partook of it throughout the day. He was viewed as a little sad, though; it was assumed he was an alcoholic.
The media neither forms nor reflects values; they riff off of fantasies of values. No, real families did not have the values or lifestyles of either the Cleavers or the Ewings.
Alcohol use in America did not change anymore from the 50’s and 60’s to now than it had before then, going from commonly used (Johnny Appleseed was spreading appleseeds for use to make hard cider, often safer to drink than was the water available) to very common heavy drinking in the early 19th century, to a dramatic drop off beginning in the mid 19th century culminating in Prohibition then up again. America’s course is not necessarily the same as other countries, many of which have maintained a middle ground (social drinking a glass of wine or beer with meals is fine but binging and drinking alone is rarely done), and others that drink hard often and have not changed much (such as Russia).
The media image of 50’s and 60’s America of Mom at home serving darling husband a martini at the door, after he had had a few on a business lunch wasn’t real for most then and wasn’t even the fantasy value for most of America’s history, let alone for other of the world’s cultures.
Well, I suppose that you could say that in some sense all professed values are actually fantasies, since what really matters is not what you say you value but what you actually do. So that means what we’re really talking about here is not values, but practices.
When I first started an office job, on Fridays one guy would have some beers in his office in the afternoon. I only knew this because he not very discreetly moved to hide it when I walked in on him one day. This was in 1998 or so.
I can’t imagine one drink at work, let alone a three martini lunch. I don’t see how I’d get any work done.
I started working in 1989, at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. By that point, having a drink at lunch was very unusual, and there was a fair amount of social pressure to conform to that. On occasion, I’d be out for lunch with suppliers from other companies, who had a drink or two, but they were invariably considerably older, and undoubtedly holdovers from the three-martini-lunch culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
I’ll also note, for contrast, that when I left the “client” side of the business in 2000, and went to work at an advertising agency, I experienced a very different culture. The occasional beer (nearly always in the singular ) at lunch was acceptable, and we would often have beer in the office for internal parties and receptions (we did have a major brewery as a client, after all).
Not exactly. It’s been a staple device of Hollywood that “filthy rich” means you have a sideboard in the office or livingroom with a decanter full of scotch, and of course an pail of ice cubes. (Who fills that up all the time? The butler, I think.) Plus, all those fancy crystal or cut glass bottles, glasses, etc. They’ve been doing this since the films of Bing Crosbie, Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers.
The cue that the charactes were going to have a loose, informal conversation was when one character pours a pair of scotch on the rocks.
I joke about it with my wife, since the characters in General Hospital still follow this stereotype, even though they paste a disguise label over recognizable shaped bottles of alcohol. Drink during the day with a private bar is a screen shortcut for “rich bastard”. Drinking from a bottle hidden in the desk is a shortcut to say “hard-bitten” as in “detective”.
I’m too young to have remembered three martini lunches at work, but I couldn’t imagine being able to stay awake in the afternoon. After lunch (especially a big one), I’m usually feeling like a nap. I can’t imagine having three or four drinks in me and being able to get anything done.
I’ve associated daytime at-work drinking with countries other than the US for a long time. I knew an electrician from Germany whose wife packed a single beer with his daily lunch. My brother in Spain routinely has wine at lunch, then goes back to work. A friend in France became very ill and got home medical care - if she wanted, she could have wine with lunch, courtesy of the medical establishment.
I’m the same age as Gary “Wombat” Robson and remember my uncle in the late 1970s talking about lunchtime drinking at Lockheed…but shortly thereafter MADD came on the scene and that was probably that.
I can’t imagine having even one drink during the day and being functional.
) at lunch was acceptable, and we would often have beer in the office for internal parties and receptions (we did have a major brewery as a client, after all).