Clearing The Air

What color is the clean air in your world?.......

Today as I was making my Smokeeter sales call rounds, I decided to stop at some Minneapolis establishments to see how much business they have gained from the clean fresh air now mandated upon their menu.

First stop Liquor Lyle's .....as I mentioned on an earlier post I stopped by here 3/31 Thurs. the first night of the smoking ban. Normally the place would have been elbows to a**holes with customers, but this Thurs. night I counted maybe a dozen. Anybody who knows the place knows it used to be a young smoking busy crowd, thankfully the smoking ban has taken care of that problem for them....business is down said manager Val....she wouldn't specify how much.

Mortimers on Lyndale told me Thursday nights used to be the biggest night for them, they now have plenty of room to sit & watch TV though, with 60%-70% of the crowd thinned out. Ah.....nice fresh air............too bad money doesn't just appear out of that nice clean air. The bar manager cursed the non-profits saying ".....where's all the business they promised us, the least they could do is stop in and leave something in our tip jar....."

A regular who knows the staff at Leaning Tower of Pizza said the uptown store was down 20% in business while the campus store was down 40% in business......ah, they're poor.......but healthy....thank god.

CC Club business is down, so they built an outdoor patio, that will work til winter....then what?

Runyon's staff said they're business is down, but their sister establishment Cafe Havana is in real bad shape.......don't cry too much for these two though, just as the smoking ban was being talked about in Mpls. last spring....John the senior owner at Runyon, Cafe Havana, Monte Carlo, said to me...."......Mark I'm all for the smoking ban....." This guy owns one of the oldest cigar bars in town and then says he can't wait for a smoking ban...... In case you haven't guessed it, owning bars for him is a hobby, he made his millions buying & selling real estate all over Mpls. ........so he has reaped what he wished for as far as I'm concerned.

I also stopped at Harvey's in Mpls., where waitstaff figures business is down 35-50%.

I could do this all day everyday, and usually spend 30-60 minutes a week asking random establishments....I have yet to find one establishment to say going non-smoking has increased business. But the employees are sure healthier.... maybe its because they're out of work that they're healthier.

posted by marcus aurelius @ 7:50 PM