I’ve known three bar owners. Between them there are 4 divorces and a suicide.
Pass.
Never. I don’t find drunks to be fun or entertaining. I generally don’t like being around people who consider drinking to be a fun activity. Bars tend to smell funny - whether from smoke, spills, vomit, people smells… nope, not interested.
If I were a multi-millionaire with no responsibilities, it might be nice to own a bar or a coffee shop as a place to hang out and hold court. I wouldn’t want to depend on it for my daily bread, though. A friend of mine has made it work - he takes two or three overseas vacations a year, so it’s obviously paying the bills - but he’s in the minority.
That and free drinks for friends.
^^^ exactly. The only bar that would be fun to own would be one that loses money. If I were independently wealthy and just wanted a cool place to go hang out where I could run it exactly like I wanted it to be run without worrying about profit, I could see the appeal. But for a living? No way in hell.
eta: arrows indicate agreement with StusBlues
Who among us doesn’t want to be Sam Malone? I’ve been feeling a bit entrepreneurial lately and even brought up the idea of a certain kind of bar to my wife, just to brainstorm a little. It won’t happen, though. While it might be kind of fun, I guarantee I’d get burnt out from the late nights and weekends.
I’d think that if I could pick my customers, serve what I want, when I want, and still somehow make money off it and not spend TOO much of my time doing it, then sure. I think a modernized Tiki bar could be really cool if done right. Same for a real pub- somewhere without a lot of loud music or a mediocre band, where people can hang out, talk, drink and eat could also be cool.
But the idea that I’d end up slinging a lot of poor food, Bud Light, vodka drinks and shitty well highballs to people who don’t appreciate any of it and just want to get drunk and have a cheap meal… no thanks.
I’d love to own a gold bar.
Oh, that sort of bar. Nah, I’m good. Bars (pubs) over here are generally too noisy for me.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm……no. I mean…no. There is a very specific and lengthy set of circumstances under which I’d do it, but the list is too long and unrealistic. So for pretty much every definition of “bar”, I couldn’t see it being the least bit enjoyable. And the wealthier I was and the less I needed the place to be a money maker, the more inclined I’d be to do just about anything else.
I owned a distillery with a tasting room for a couple of years. It was fun tending bar and telling stories and we had a good group of customers. The drinks we’re expensive and we closed by 11 or midnight which kept the worst of the rift raft away. There were a couple of people who brought prostitutes but we never had to throw someone out or had some one throw up. But man it sucks never having a weekend off every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night there I was behind the bar whenever I tried to bring in help they inevitably screwed something up or canceled at the last minute. I took three weeks off for my kid being born and sales dropped 40%. The next time I open a distillery it will be with a bar manager and I won’t have anything to do with the day to day operations except when I show in to drink and hang out with friends.
Another tough thing about owning a bar is staying relevant. You need to remodel the place every ten year, heck a bunch of bar owners I know close the bar every 10 years and change the name. Keeping it trendy it a lot of work . Even if it’s just the neighborhood dive you need to get new people to replace the ones dying.
Make 3 “Janitors coming off shift at the university” and you just described 90% of my income/tips. 
It was the 70s though and every bar was smokey. Mornings were hard-core smokers, cops and janitors; afternoon was students, early evening working stiffs, night was back to students again. A college area/town bar is fairly reliable if you can put in the hours or hire half-honest people to find the hours but it still isn’t something I want to call mine.
(One great thing with my clients; some idiot tried to rob the place with a single-shot shotgun. My 30+ customers, almost to a man, were armed and ready. He got arrested ------ pretty much because no-one wanted to do the paperwork to shoot him.)
How then do some bars stay in business for decades?
LISTof oldest bars in each state.
Bar –
Drunk people (often either boring or hostile or both), arguments, accidents, fights, spills, damage to the property, fixtures, and dishware, long nights and weekends, people wanting to smoke, animaistic behavior in the restrooms, having to stock a million types of liquor …
Coffee shop –
Rarely any of those things
Ever wonder where the bars get their alcohol from? My father was one of those sellers. He had more than enough tales about bars that I wouldn’t even think about owning one as anything other than a hands-off investor, and even then, considering the liability concerns (did your bartender miscount how many drinks he served someone who later tried to drive home drunk? That’ll be God’s own number of dollars plus an extra 50% to cover the 1/3 that the lawyers get, thank you very much), I doubt I would.
Eh, most of the ones I know liked their drink, but they were forced to cut down due to the demands of the job. On a rare night off they’ll get pretty tanked though. But they can’t have a crippling drinking problem and run a bar.
Nope, no bar ownership for me. My daughter and SIL just bought a franchise restaurant/bar where he has worked as GM for years. The hours are ungodly, the staffing is unreliable (and they have a pretty good staff, it’s just the nature of young, part time employees) and customers are often unreasonable. Nope, I wouldn’t do it if the only drawback was the hours.
Do you think they just order one drink and sit there? They are usually ordering one beer an hour, if not at a more frequent rate.
My local bar is connected to a pizza place. The owner seems pretty happy as do the managers.
I think I wasn’t clear. Not all bars close every 10 years and get a new name but I know several bar owners who own their building and close down their bar around once a decade and change it from a dive bar to a collegiate shot bar or whatever is trendy same ownership same management same bartenders just new name and new decor. Other people I know who have bars just remodel 10% every year maybe its getting new bathrooms but just because a bar is old, same name and location, doesn’t mean there isn’t a new interior design or at least refreshining of the old design on a regular basis. The ones that the owner sits on until they die or retire are the ones that have 4 old bar flys in there on Saturday night not the bars that hold hundreds of people and are printing cash.
I’m probably the wrong person to ask, as I don’t think I’m the business-owning type in general. If I were, though, I don’t envision a bar being the way I’d go.
While markups on alcohol can be high, you’d really need a sizeable and sustainable clientele to make a good go of it in the long haul. That’s difficult to build from scratch, and I’m guessing already established and profitable bars don’t go up for sale very often. Others have mentioned the long hours and having to deal with drunks all the time. I’ll add that you could very easily get sued into oblivion if one of your customers were to get behind a wheel and kill themselves or someone else on the way home.
Too risky for my blood.
Something like 90% of indepedently-owned restaurants and bars close within a year of opening. I can certainly understand why; far too many of them are started by people who have absolutely no clue what they are getting into.