I was in my early twenties when Indiana banned the promotional practice of “happy hour,” or alcoholic beverage discounts predicated on the time of day or “class” of customer being targeted (i.e., ladies night).
It has been “Happy Day or Bust” in Hoosierland ever since. A bar may advertise dollar longnecks during the UFC bout, but it must charge the same low price for as long as the bar is open on that particular business day.
Until now.
After hinting at changes for a good many years, the Indiana legislature has performed an act of statutory surgery, and happy hour will return at last to the state, effective July 1. The fine print isn’t at all onerous, with happy “hour” being limited to four hours each day. Discounting cannot extend past 10:00 p.m.
Indiana governor signs bill lifting ban on happy hours after nearly 40 years, at WDRB-41.
Indiana lawmakers now say happy hour will help restaurants and bars stay open. When news of the legislation reinstating happy hour came out, Indiana bar owners were happy to know they’d no longer lose business to bars across the river in Louisville where they could get cheaper drinks.
The happy hour legislation flew through the Indiana Statehouse with almost no opposition. Lawmakers seemly brought back happy hour as a post-pandemic recovery tool to help the struggling restaurant and bar industry in Indiana.
Speaking as one who has spent almost his whole adult life working in the beer and restaurant businesses, I’m not opposed to the reinstitution of happy hour. However, I’m wary, and invite readers to consider the legislature’s stated logic: “Indiana lawmakers now say happy hour will help restaurants and bars stay open.”
Are Southern Indiana bars really losing appreciable business to their brethren “across the river” because they’re denied the tactic of offering cut-rate drinks from noon to three on Thursday, or is the real problem their traditional indifference to joining together to collectively promote, and to benefit from, a shared marketing strategy?
Count me as among those who doubt whether a couple bucks off a cocktail is enough to lure drinkers to go out of their way and across state lines to find bars they don’t know exist.
I’m also of the opinion, which shouldn’t be controversial, that the encouragement of over-consumption (whether implied or overt) is a sticky wicket given the car-centric nature of America, which has changed little since 1985, the year when I visited Europe for the first time and experienced the beauty of public transportation as it pertains to conveying the tipsy.
Responsible restaurant and bar owners always conduct their businesses with awareness, and will continue doing so, yet as much as I’d like to refute it, driving drunk has been a huge problem ever since automobiles were invented.
Impaired driving might well have preceded internal combustion when it came to horse-powered vehicles being steered (or not) by intoxicated humans, although at least the horses kept their wits about them, but drunk driving did not register as a widespread public safety concern until America’s rapid suburbanization after World War II produced three cars in every driveway.
Looking the other way about the implications persisted well into the 1970s, when I came of age. As Barron H. Lerner writes, “In a country that celebrated both drinking and driving, it has long been hard to convince people that it was unacceptable to do both.”
Accordingly, I cannot recall hearing much about “designated drivers” during high school, when those ubiquitous “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” public service advertisements were still a decade or more in the future.
While the 1968 Alcohol and Highway Safety Report authored by William Haddon, Jr. and A. Benjamin Kelley concluded that alcohol was a factor in 800,000 traffic mishaps annually and 25,000 deaths, abstraction began hardening into action only in 1980, when Candace Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after her daughter was killed by a recidivist drunk driver.
MADD’s ensuing symmetry was incredible. Lightner’s creation shot up the charts nationwide, widely viewed as an overdue corrective, and absolutely nailing the zeitgeist.
“Two modes of advocacy converged in the early 1980s,” explains Lerner. “On the one hand, anti-drunk driving efforts built upon recent progressive activism such as the Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, and second-wave feminism (hence Mothers Against Drunk Driving).
“On the other hand, fighting drunk driving meshed with more conservative, Reagan-era efforts to create ‘wars’ against drugs and crime and to recognize the rights of crime victims.”
MADD’s lobbying efforts were impressive. According to Lerner, “By the mid-1980s, states had passed over 700 new drunk driving laws, closing loopholes, imposing stricter penalties and lowering the legal blood alcohol limit from as high as 0.15 percent to 0.10 percent and then 0.08 percent.”
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Hence the tenor of the times 39 years ago, when Indiana lawmakers accepted the case being made by MADD, and concluded that maybe the institution of happy hour was making the situation worse.
At the age of 25, I was vociferous in my condemnation of MADD. At 63, I can see that feeling this way was a reflection of cognitive dissonance. In short, I knew MADD was right. When it came to driving drunk, I did, and so did many of my friends. I can’t speak for all of them, but my own cringe-worthy rationalization was that I drove impaired often enough to become quite adept at it, which is ridiculous.
The older I’ve gotten, the more careful I’ve become. My consumption of alcoholic beverages has declined to such a low level that sometimes I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. There is sampling and sipping aplenty, and the very thought of drinking more than a pint or three of low-gravity “session” beer gives me pause.
It’s been a very long time since I risked driving drunk, but it doesn’t mean another time won’t occur somewhere down the line. It might, which is why I’ve made every effort to organize my life in a way that precludes the possibility.
At this precise moment, it seems to me that MADD did in fact contribute mightily toward recasting the act of drunk driving as a social stigma, perhaps a negative beyond the sensibility of the worst offenders, but an uncomfortable truth that resonated with me in spite of myself. I suspect there’ll be readers who feel the same way.
Back in ’85 when the happy hour ban first took effect, several SoIN establishments responded by offering food-based happy hours. We’d been going to the long defunct Chi Chi’s in Clarksville for happy hour margaritas, and when the law changed, the restaurant showcased a cheap food buffet instead.
The final cost to the consumer worked out about the same when buying the beverages at full price and loading up on inexpensive grub. As a trencherman, I liked it, but evidently there was little traction. the buffet quietly disappeared.
However, edible happy hours never went away entirely. Dragon King’s Daughter in New Albany has run happy hour food specials since it opened, and my wife and I tend to calibrate our visits to take advantage of these. Typically we each have a drink, and then we’re good to go (literally).
Hoosiers will have happy hour again, but it’s complicated. It always was, and will remain so.
Previously:
Edibles & Potables: How Greek patriotism revolutionized moussaka
