Why aren't there more smoke-free bars and cafes?

January 11, 2007 · 10 comments

Why more bars and cafes in Copenhagen don’t go smoke-free voluntarily is beyond me. Look at the numbers. 75% of your potential customers are non-smokers. And based on anecdotal evidence, people are fed up with passive smoke.

Or look at a business case. Ølbaren in Elmegade went smoke-free one night a week, then expanded to two, and finally went all smoke-free all the time. Reading the forums and newsletters you can tell that they were concerned, but apparently it worked out financially okay for them.

I don’t know if they actually experienced an increase in business, but it seems likely that would happen, as there’s currently such a shortage of smoke-free places that it makes it a special attraction.

Come April 1st there will be a mostly complete smoke ban, anyway, so why not pre-empt this and make it part of your brand and create a little extra customer loyalty by being an early mover? It seems like a business opportunity just sitting there. Perhaps there’s a disproportionate share of smokers amongst bar-owners?

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Comments ↓

1 Kasper // Jan 11, 2007 at 03:18 PM

Why not have both? Why must a ban be imposed in order to shape peoples daily life? I'd much rather have the liberty of choice whenever I go out; if I don't want to be subjected to second-hand smoke I simply go to places where there's a no-smoking policy. If I feel like smoking, I would never dream about going to places where they try to pull a ban down over my head...
2 Aaron // Jan 11, 2007 at 09:12 PM

I personally can't wait for the ban to be introduced. I'm a little concerned that it will be a bit half-hearted though. Aren't there exceptions to the rule? A ban should mean a ban - allowing smoking in an adjacent room totally defeats the purpose as staff and customers are still going to inhale the smoke and wake up stinking of it. Kasper, I understand your point but I don't see how this is a question of liberty. People who work in cafes should not have their lives shortened because of other people's stupidity.
3 Lars Pind // Jan 11, 2007 at 09:47 PM

The point I'm trying to make is that hardly anybody seems to have chosen the voluntary smoke-free policy, even though I suspect it might be a good business decision.
4 Aaron // Jan 12, 2007 at 09:13 AM

Well, it's an interesting question. Back home in the UK there are far more bars which went smoke-free voluntarily and the result was beneficial. I'm not sure why it's not the case here - maybe a higher percentage of Danes are smokers?!
5 Lars Pind // Jan 12, 2007 at 09:19 AM

25% according to the latest numbers I saw. That's still 75% that are not. The difficulty, of course, is when 2 people meet, there's a 44% chance that at least one of them is a smoker (is that accurate? I did .75*.75 = .5625 is the probability that both are non-smokers, 1-.5625 = .4375 is the probability that that is not the case, ie. at least one is a smoker). Add more people, and that number adds up. It's the whole thing about whether smokers have the right to pollute the environment for people who do not chose it. If you sat next to someone and started farting like crazy, chances are they'd get annoyed. Or try shouting.
6 robin // Jan 12, 2007 at 10:07 AM

DK is stupidly over-represented in the smoking stakes. It's a strange myopic hole Danish smokers have fallen into whereby they think that their right to smoke (see Kasper's comment above) somehow automatically overrides some other person's right to non-smoke-polluted air. It's a really weird thing, and it's particularly strong in DK. It's also linked to the "if you don't like what I'm doing then YOU can go somewhere else" delusion (i.e. onus on the person who is affected to leave/distance themselves). Hello?? I have little time for smokers - people who have no respect for preservation of their own health must have *my* health so low on their importance scale so as not really be visible at all.
7 rw // Jan 13, 2007 at 11:43 PM

From personal experience, people who own bars and cafes are indeed quite often smokers themselves. I'll try to find it again, but a few years back I read an article about a psychological study that showed people with very irregular work schedules or employed doing things with irregular income and highly variable work related tasks were much more likely to be smokers. Cab drivers, cops, EMTs, soldiers, small business owners (like bar owners), etc. The theory was that smoking was a way to impose a regular structure within chaos that they had no control over. Regarding Robin's comment, I'm pretty sure that most non-smokers are also not thinking about your health, or the health of other non-smokers, or smokers, for that matter. The health of random strangers is not on the radar of anyone, unless you're an epidemiologist or are afraid someone is going to sneeze on you.
8 morten // Jan 15, 2007 at 11:42 AM

the smoke prevents people from smelling each others farts, sweat and what have we...
9 Kasper // Jan 17, 2007 at 01:27 PM

@ Aaron: But people working in bars, cafes, etc. with no smoke ban can find alternate jobs if they can't take the heat (so to speak). No-one is forcing them to put up with the smoke. @ Robin: My point is that I recent the fact that the *government* decides how people should live their daily lives. My argument is, that people can actually manage this themselves, i.e. bar-owners who does not want smoking, can obviously just ban smoking in their bar, cafe, etc. Thus, smoking patrons can simply go somewhere else.
10 Kasper // Jan 18, 2007 at 12:20 AM

Edit: recent = resent

Lars Pind

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