Bar Rescue
One of my favorite shows these days is called Bar Rescue. It's about fixing up failing bars. How do you get to appear on Bar Rescue? Well basically you buy a bar and run it into the ground. Then you send a letter to Spike TV begging for some help. This guy named John Taffer shows up and after yelling at you and your staff, tries to turn your bar into a money maker instead of a money pit.
Why do I like this show so much? It's hilarious! The people who own the bars seem so stupid! The majority of them don't seem to have any idea how to run a business at all! Most of them hire their friends or family who then take advantage of them and destroy the business. You can't fire these people, can you? They're friends and family! *chuckle* So most of these idiots are just content to lose money month after month. Usually when Bar Rescue get there, the bar is ready to close within about 3 months.
I just watched a show where John Taffer went to a bar in North Carolina called "Cashmere". This place had a manager who acted worse than most three year old children! They watched him on hidden cameras drinking, running around without a shirt on and giving away free booze to people. He kept screaming "I'm all in!". Watching him with the hidden cameras you could easily see why the bar was losing money. Who would go there to get a drink with an annoying idiot like that running around?
Oh it was much worse than it appeared. Not only was the bar full of cockroaches, the staff was also pouring cheap booze into premium booze bottles and trying to pass it off as something it wasn't. Pouring alcohol from one bottle into another at a bar is illegal and the bar could have lost its liquor license over something like that. Mr. "All in" didn't care. He was just there to party!
Now you would think that after all the things Mr. "All in" had done they would fire him right off the bat, right? Nope. He cried on camera and kept saying he could change. How touching. But of course, he didn't change. John Taffer told him to dump out all the booze bottles that had been refilled. He didn't bother to do that. He didn't care. Why do what you're told when you can instead just yell "All in!" and do what you want instead? *chuckle*
They still didn't fire this guy. Next, they had what they call a "stress test". That's when they somehow get a huge amount of people to come into the bar and try and order drinks and food to see if the staff can really handle it. They couldn't. No one followed directions and the idiot still kept running around yelling "All in!" and getting in everyone's way. The experts that were brought in to help train the staff hated this guy, the staff hated this guy, and the night seemed pretty unpleasant. So did they finally fire him then? Nope.
Now John Taffer is upset. He tells everyone to report to wok in the morning for training. Mr. "All in" didn't bother to show up. The owner didn't seem to know what to do. Finally Taffer had to TELL the owner to fire Mr. "All in". They fired him over the phone and hung up just as he was yelling "Bullshit!". *chuckle*
So now Bar Rescue spends a lot of money to refurbish the place and they change the name to "Dual Ultra Lounge". After watching the show I always like to go to the website called "Yelp" to look at reviews for the new place. At the end of the show they always say how nice the renovated place is doing. If you look on Yelp you can see the truth. "Dual" isn't well liked. So obviously you can change a place to make it look nice, but you can't really change the people who work there unless they themselves want to change.
Now this isn't to say that all the bars don't turn themselves around. There are a good number that actually do get things straightened out. Some owners and employees do actually want to learn. Of course they sometimes run into problems when the show renovates the bar without bothering to get any building permits from the city. That's been an issue. But as a show, I love this! It's fun to watch John Taffer yell at incompetent people! *chuckle*
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