Let's Destroy a Bar!

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*

TV when you're sick

I caught this year's flu.  Yuck.  And so what did I do for my days off this week?  I stayed in bed and watched tv.  And what do you suppose I watched?  Re-runs of I Love Lucy?  Unfortunately no, I ended up watching some reality tv.  Well, sort of reality.  Take this show Carfellas.  Does this actually look real to anyone?  It might be, I'm sure there are people like this somewhere.  But it looks a bit made up to me:

Now the premise of this show is that the main guy Mike was in prison for "racketeering" for the "mob" I guess?  And now he's out of prison and decides to run a used car lot with two other fat Italian guys.  Not that I don't believe this, but I tried googling his name, and can't really seem to find any news reports, or anything that really links this guy to a "mob."  And the only news report I could find that said he did three years in prison was written as a promo for the show.  I don't see this one lasting.  *chuckle*  

Next is one of my favorite shows now!  It's called "Bar Rescue." This guy goes to bars that are really pretty much slums and fixes them up so they'll be profitable and decent places to drink.  He always fixes up bars that are also restaurants, and the best part of the show is when he goes in and starts yelling about how the kitchen is filthy, or how there is a dead mouse somewhere, or garbage piled up in a corner.  And the employees never seem to understand what he's yelling about.  They'll tell the camera "I'm pretty embarrassed about what he's saying right now." but they've been working in this filth for years!  So they were embarrassed, but were always to lazy to fix anything!  It's hilarious!

I watched this episode this morning.  This clip wasn't in the episode, though.  Probably because good ol' John there talks about "manipulating employees."  If you actually listen to what he's saying, he's right.  He does know what he's talking about.  "You want employees to like you so they don't steal from you." Very good philosophy!  *chuckle*  The bar that they're in right now was called Swanky (Stinky) Bubbles.  One of the owners was giving away most of the drinks free to women so he could hit on them, but he couldn't figure out why the bar was losing money.  One of the "cooks" quit when John told him to start cleaning up the filthy kitchen.  It was really hilarious!  The funniest part of this episode to me was that at the end they always tell you what happened 30 days after the bar was fixed up.  30 days after this one was fixed up, it was right back in the toilet where it started.  Some people just don't listen. *chuckle*

And last, but not least, another ultimate favorite of mine:  Man and Woman vs Wild.  This one is just silly.  The man is an ex military survival expert, and the woman is his blonde, ex newscaster wife.  She's a British bimbo.  I don't say that to be rude, but you don't take your city girl, feminine blonde wife out into the wilds and then try to survive without supplies.  In the "Alaska" episode, they wouldn't have survived, and had to stop the show and call in rescue people.  Things just didn't work out.  That's ok, I can accept that, people don't always survive.  In another episode though, the blonde woman ends up with heat stroke and they call in a medic who gives her water, and food, and gets her well again in a couple of hours.  Then she wants to continue.  It's not really a survival situation if when things get rough you just call in a medic! Just a goofy show!  

Now not to dog on the blonde, but look at how much footage they show of her with this thing in her mouth.  How many of the crew do you think were in stitches watching this?  Yes, it's meant to be a survival technique, but all we see on tv is this blonde shoving a phallic object into her mouth over and over.  You don't see the guy sucking on it.  How...entertaining.

So, that's it for watching tv while I was sick.  I think I slept through most everything else.  With any luck I'll feel better next week and get back to work on setting up my book for release.