To halt binge drinking, stop buying rounds
Pub-goers should stop buying rounds of drinks and set up a tab for their party instead to cut down on binge drinking, an adviser to David Cameron has said.
Does this guy have any clue at all about the guff he is verbally barfing? I seriously doubt it.
Richard Thaler, a professor at Chicago University, suggests that groups of three or more should set up a tab to be split at the end of the evening to stop each member of a party feeling obligated to buy a round for everyone.
Prof Thaler, a key adviser to the Prime Minister on behavioural economics or "nudge" policy, said of buying rounds: "It is just a tradition and it has this unintended consequence.
"So if I was giving advice, I would say if there were more than three of you I would run a tab. These are the kinds of things that policy makers and publicans should be thinking about." He told The Daily Telegraph that he had discussed the plan with a senior official in the Cabinet Office.
What an absolute dick cheese. Where to even begin with this hideous bag of bollocks? Three paragraphs of speech and each one of them, complete and utter arse waffle.
Paragraph one: "groups of three or more should set up a tab to be split at the end of the evening " Why do we buy rounds? To save time at the bar. If we had to set up a tab we would have to fanny about at the end of the evening, after a skinful, trying to figure out who owes what, and throughout the night, everyone would have to get up and order their own drinks, wasting time and annoying the very busy bar staff.
"to stop each member of a party feeling obligated to buy a round for everyone." Erm? Getting steaming bollocks drunk takes money. If you've just bought a round for everyone you wont have a lot of it. Seriously though, being in a round helps you pace yourself. Everyone drinks at a different rate. If you are in a round, you all drink only as fast as the slowest drinker in your group. If there is one binge drinker among you they will keep going to the bar as and when they feel like it, building up a huge tab that you all have to split at the end of the night.
Paragraph two: "It is just a tradition and it has this unintended consequence." It's nothing to do with tradition. As I've said, it saves time at the bar and if there's a group of you, say six, each person only goes to the bar for one in six drinks.
Paragraph three: These are the kinds of things that policy makers and publicans should be thinking about." Number one, this has nothing to do with policy makers whatsoever. Number two, as an ex publican, I certainly would not be thinking about it. Running tabs is wrong in so many ways. Here's a few:
1) It's easy for people to run up a bill then run off. If someone sets up a tab you need to get then to leave a credit card behind the bar. Not everyone has cards. Some people will leave a stolen card.
2) If you are not getting up and paying cash for every round, but leaving payment to the end, you are less likely to worry about how much you are spending and more likely to drink more than you normally would if you had to count out the cash for every beer.
3) If a large group of people keep coming to the bar and buying their own drinks, rather than one from the group buying a round, it takes a lot longer to serve them. At busy periods this could be a big problem if everyone was doing it.
Utter bollocks from start to finish. I don't often find myself as part of a round these days, but when I was younger, a group of us would often go out to the pub. As we were all individuals and not robots, our needs and wants were different.
There were a couple of engineering types who earned more money than all of us put together. They didn't mind what they were paying or for who. There were a couple of us on low wages who were watching every penny. Some drank bitter or lager, some drank double vodka and red bull.
As we were all adults with minds of our own we were able to work out the rounds without any problem. We would group off in threes and fours and get rounds based on price. The expensive alcopop drinkers would get their own rounds. The drivers never paid for anything. if anyone wanted to bug out of a round they could at any time. No one felt obliged and no one binge drank.
Enter the government and that's when the problems begin. The unintended consequence you speak of Mr Thaler, is the consequence of government interference where it is neither wanted nor required.
Oh, and I forgot to mention. Alcohol on credit is illegal you bellend.
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