I quit tech about a year ago, sailed up the inside passage to SE Alaska in a little 30' sailboat, and ended up working at a dive bar similar to what this author describes for 8 months over the winter.
I met a ton of incredible people, and had a lot of fun, but also burned out. Never having bartended before, there were some surprises:
- No food in most of the bars in town, other than bags of chips. This made it hard to slow people down.
- No inventory control. Bottles weren't weighed or measured in any way. Any employee could, in theory, steal alcohol with absolutely no way for the bar to know (there were no cameras in the building, either). As a consequence, bartenders would pour quite heavy at times, especially for the regular day-drinking crowd (with tacit approval from the owner).
There is a huge dynamic where the money is so good (my take-home was normally in the range of 40-50/hour during the slow season for my Friday night shift), and most bartenders that I met didn't have any other options to earn that kind of money, so would keep bartending despite the burnout. The golden handcuffs are real.
I met a ton of incredible people, and had a lot of fun, but also burned out. Never having bartended before, there were some surprises:
- No food in most of the bars in town, other than bags of chips. This made it hard to slow people down.
- No inventory control. Bottles weren't weighed or measured in any way. Any employee could, in theory, steal alcohol with absolutely no way for the bar to know (there were no cameras in the building, either). As a consequence, bartenders would pour quite heavy at times, especially for the regular day-drinking crowd (with tacit approval from the owner).
There is a huge dynamic where the money is so good (my take-home was normally in the range of 40-50/hour during the slow season for my Friday night shift), and most bartenders that I met didn't have any other options to earn that kind of money, so would keep bartending despite the burnout. The golden handcuffs are real.