Conflict Sells

 Bar None Rescue

Now for something completely different.  A summer break of sort.  Tired of reading theoretical philosophic ‘hokum?’  Like to visit taverns, bars, public houses, pubs, watering holes, lounges, alehouses, roadhouses, speakeasies, tap rooms, breweries, gin mills, beer joints, distilleries, grog shops or dives? 

Taffer Bellows

There is a show on free TV called Bar Rescue hosted by an aggressive, tough, cranky former New Yorker named John Taffer.  It follows a formula like all reality shows, and seems like it was inspired by an angry Brit, Gordon Ramsey of Hell’s Kitchen.  Ramsey visits failing restaurants and confronts their inept owners, filthy conditions, terrible food and aging décor with yelling and denunciations.  Taffer does the same thing, but includes drinks.  Shows like this might convince you never to go out for food as they reveal the secrets ‘behind the kitchen door.’  It might also convince you that all problems can be solved by a yelling bully who owns you.

There are hidden things going on in this show, as in all reality TV.  Like whose paying for the upgrade, does Taffer’s company get a share of the bar, what is the failure rate, and how much scripting is done to depict ‘reality.’  The show claims Taffer has rescued hundreds of bars from bankruptcy and closure.  Many of these places were losing money every month and were tens of thousands in debt.  Yet statistics show that only 49% of his ‘bar rescues’ actually work to keep the bars open, as of July 2024.  A 51% failure rate shows something else is going on that Taffer’s quick fixes, which last 3 days, can’t fix.  What that is left is unmentioned but it has to do with the intricacies of the capitalist system.

If you’ve been to bars where the drinks are weak, the staff clueless, the food terrible and the atmosphere weird, this show is for you.  Most of these places are run by families, so these bars fit the common profile of the petit-bourgeois small businessmen.  The families on this show are dysfunctional, are always fighting and many have little experience in running a place or a business.  One of the formulas is Taffer tearfully bringing the family members together to try to make a go of it.  Mwaa mwaa.   

Some of the owners are drunks who think the place is just a party room for them and their buds.  Others think it is a display area for their crappy singing or DJ skills.  Others use it to hit up on women.  Many have bad tempers.  Some can’t think of any food other than burgers, fries and pizza and still make a hash of that. There are problem employees too – lazy, drunk or inept.  Many have never been trained in anything.

Taffer scopes out the bar before entering as the thundering elephant he is, using staff members that are secretly sent ahead.  He has hidden cameras showing bar tenders giving away drinks, managers lounging around, cooks using unhealthful methods to make food and food or drinks that are inedible or undrinkable. Is the staff oblivious to the cameras and just do what they do?  Is the owner so stupid he doesn’t even try to spruce the place up before Taffer shows up?  After all, the owner has called Taffer’s company for help. 

Taffer barges in and normally bellows at the owner in front of the patrons.  Get this, many of the owners refuse to listen to Taffer even though they called on him.  The confrontations actually seem real. If there is an incompetent or problematic worker or ‘manager,’ Taffer later forces the weak, wobbly ‘boss’ to fire them.  None of these places are union of course.  If the bosses don’t listen to him, he walks out and they have to beg him to stay.

Taffer brings in an expert mixologist and an expert chef to improve drinks and food after analyzing the neighborhood and location of the bar.  A constant is that he’s usually shooting to gentrify or upgrade the bar to make more money by luring in a more moneyed clientele, not a bunch of bikers, rowdies and bar flies.  One of his statistics is that if there are more than 3 motorcycles in front of a bar, many women will not go in.  Uniformly the bar tenders don’t know how to make drinks properly, they waste beer down the drain, the equipment is flawed, the wood rotten and bar systems non-existent.  One poured cheap booze into top-shelf bottles. One punk barkeep’s shtick was making lewd comments to every woman customer.  He pledged to stop.  Right.

The kitchens are sometimes even worse.  Unclean, grease all over the place, coolers and fridges that are too warm, food handled poorly, an untrained cook and cockroaches. Taffer will scream and sometimes shut the whole bar down when he sees a health-code violation. Taffer’s experts try to upgrade the menu, teach the bartenders how to make more advanced cocktails, tell them they have to ‘work together’ and make the manager actually manage.  Then they have a ‘stress test’ packing the bar with people that overwhelms the staff every time.  This is all part of their quickie training.  As you watch, you are dubious that the training will ever take.

It's a TV show, not Reality.

The bar’s design and décor is many times that of someone’s fraternity house basement full of tacky ideas, like Halloween or pirate stuff all over the place - as if a child envisioned the theme.  Booths are worn through, the bar itself is structurally unsound and the place from the outside looks wrong – invisible, creepy or dirty. He’ll change the bar name if it’s off, making it more modern.  Taffer brings along a bunch of contractors to quickly improve lighting, replace furniture, install modern POS systems, fix the bar displays and modernize the kitchen equipment.  Is this install fully paid for by the advertising of the show? Or does Taffer become the real owner?  Given the failure rate, I’d say no and Taffer claims the same, as his production company and sponsors pay for everything.  Yet he also gets an equity stake in the bars he fixes, a partial ownership claim.  He sometimes even says to the ‘staff’ – “I’m your boss now.”    

Then they reopen after the upgrade, invite a huge crowd of supposed locals into the ‘new’ bar and it’s a happy ending for TV.  They never show the bar attempts that fail initially.

REALITY

Taffer used to manage the legendary Troubadour music club in LA, and then opened his own bar later.  But he’s sometimes full of hot air, making obvious mistakes about drinks.  Like all ‘reality’ shows Bar Rescue is manipulated.  Participants on the show have said the staff fed them lines, made up the amount of debt they were in and otherwise structured their performance.  Many of the people in the bar are extras hired for the show. Some confrontations are staged.  The last season is trying to put an emphasis on emotions and kindness instead of yelling and anger but that might bore faithful viewers. The confrontations are what gets people watching, not tips on how to run a bar.  The show does provide a behind-the-scenes look at how bad some businesses are though.

Taffer oddly owns the phrase ‘Shut it Down!” that he uses when everything in the bar is going awry during a stress test.  Taffer, unsurprisingly, is a multi-millionaire business owner himself and told Fox News that the unemployed were like ‘hungry dogs.’  He later apologized.  Most bars only last 5-7 years, so like many small businesses, the failure rate is high. Statistically 85% of most new businesses fail after 18 months according to the IRS. The lure that a small business will save you from proletarian drudgery is just that, a siren song sung by the capitalists. This show and its actual stats hints at the reality.

(Insulted by covering pop culture and TV?  It is a long Left tradition...)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Palmer’s Bar,” “L’Assommoir”(Zola);  “In Search of the Blues,” “Post Office” (Bukowski); “Sweet Thursday” (Steinbeck); “Dill Pickle Club,” “Postcards From the End of America,” "The Bachelor," 'Behind the Kitchen Door."

The Cultural Marxist

September 19, 2024