26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Dealing With Customers Who Drink Too Much

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Running an English Bar in Spain - Deciding Who To Serve

Who Not To Serve

99.99% of customers in the West Marbella area are no problem at all and so very many are wonderful friendly people. But very occasionally you will get a difficult customer to deal with and today I want to talk about the ones that like to drink too much.

You don’t get many drunks in West Marbella, as it is not a package tourist area. The bars are open early in the morning and you can find a place to drink in in the early hours of the morning too. For this reason people don’t rush their drinking and it’s rare to find a real drunk.

But in the case where an inebriated person walks into your restaurant or bar - here’s the secret to dealing with them.

1. Don’t allow him or her to come inside, but keep him/her out on the terrace.
2. Explain to your drunk that you are just closing-up and try to get him/her to move on.
3. NOW at this point don’t make any conversation other than other than what has been suggested.
4. Completely ignore his/her attempts to ask for a drink. Don’t make any eye contact. He or she will probably get bored with the lack of attention and leave.
5. If you can’t move your drunk on then make sure that you NEVER serve him/her a drink. (If you do you will never get rid of the person, they will almost certainly cause trouble and you risk your other customers walking out.)
6. If this strategy fails to move your drunk on, then try suggesting in a calm and kind voice that he/she have had enough to drink and that you think it’s time to go home. If you really have to do so, call him/her a cab, but make sure he/she has the money to pay for it.
7. The absolute last result is to threaten that you will call the Police and if they still don’t go, call the Police, but remember it’s not a good idea for your bar to be known by the police for attracting drunks.

Don’t worry too much about this problem, as we only get about 4 real drunks a year and usually if you just ignore them they simple go away. In 20 years we have only ever had to put one drunk in a taxi and we have never had to call the Police.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.