[Weird.. TV3 news is b'casting live from Fashion Week and the show is over for the night and Dimmer's Crystalator is blaring out, being used as room-clearing music...]
...Anyway... an Irishman walked into a pub... and had a beer with me. Really. With reference to the impending ban on smoking in bars in NZ, here's some snippets of things he told me about the aftermath of similar legislation coming into effect in Ireland.
- Attendance or custom or whatever went down by 70%
- Result of this drop was that the breweries and the bars drop [oh the heavenly punning] the price of beer, conceivably to entice the punters back
- One bar spent over a million quid building a rooftop outdoors area where people could drink and smoke
- Said bar cleaned up, attracting smoking punters away from other bars from miles around [this apparently no mean feat, in the legendarily-parochial Irish pub scene]
- Another bar has built a guillotine-style contraption on its outer wall where a punter can stick his head out into the street and smoke a ciggy. Queues ensued.
The only thing I really had to contribute is that I know that one reasonably well-established bar here in Wellington is building a secret "smoke-easy" beneath its regular bar.
Go Prohibition-styles... Elliot Ness... Al Capone... Untouchables. etc.
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