Cleveland’s alternative weekly paints a grim picture of post-smoking ban tavern business:

For today’s lesson, let’s go to our more educated brethren in Toledo.

That city enacted a ban in 2003. Within a year, roughly 20 bars closed. Business bottomed so hard that when they auctioned off liquor licenses — the gold standard of the street-level economy — no one showed up to bid.

Arnie Elzey owns a sizable sports bar, the kind with theater seating and NFL Ticket. His place used to be packed. Then came the ban.

His sales plummeted by 40 percent; his employee ranks fell with it. Twelve workers qualified for unemployment. Another 10 quit because they couldn’t get the shifts. He started closing for lunch, and his happy hour died. “People would come in for one drink and then leave,” he says. “People go outside to smoke and they don’t come back.”

Meanwhile, 10 minutes away in Michigan, where cigs and bars had yet to divorce, business boomed. The most crushing evidence came on Super Bowl Sunday last year. Elzey’s place, which once flourished on any game day, was at just two-thirds capacity. In Michigan, however, people waited in lines to get in the door. “Seventy percent of the cars in the parking lot were from Ohio,” he says.

Most neighborhood joints ignored the law. “They’d have someone watching the door,” says Elzey, as if they’d been transplanted to the days of Prohibition. So police, much to their chagrin, were dispatched to bust people for Illegal Use of Ashtray. In terms of burning public resources, it was akin to sending out squads on jaywalking stings. “The cops don’t want to do it because it’s stupid,” says Elzey. “They sit there and they shake their heads.”

Give Toledo credit. It took only a year for it to reach that inevitable “Oh, shit!” moment. Last fall, voters repealed much of the ban.

I’m not fond of the economic case against smoking bans, simply because once a ban does pass, it enables the anti-smoking healthists to recruit tavern owners to expand the ban to neighboring communities. I’d rather see a principled property rights case. But I suppose we should take what we can get.

Thanks to Pete Kotz for the link.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2005 at 3:31 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.