9 Situations Only Bartenders Can Relate To

People outside of the food and beverage industry often fetishize the role of the bartender. To them, the job consists of piles of cash, lots of flirting, and nights spent drinking and partying. In reality, being a bartender is a lot harder. Besides making drinks, a bartender’s duties include being a therapist and babysitter to a roomful of half sober strangers. Throw in some oddball hours and a total lack of stability, and you’re just beginning to grasp the life of the bartender. To help you better understand what your bartender deals with every day, here are nine situations only bartenders experience.

What is this “weekend” that you speak of? For bartenders, Fridays and Saturdays are two of the most coveted shifts (day and night) and when they make 90 percent of their income. Mondays and Tuesdays are generally a bartender’s days off and, believe it or not, that makes for a great “weekend”—no crowds to deal with because everyone else is stuck in the office.

Bartenders live the Count Dracula lifestyle and are asleep while most everyone else is awake.
In New York, bars are open from 5 p.m. until 4 a.m.—with restaurant bars closing at a slightly more reasonable 1 or 2 a.m. Most bartenders go out after work to relax, and sleep doesn’t happen until everyone else in the world is getting up to start the day. With hours like those, it’s nearly impossible to date outside the industry.

Sick days? Vacation? That’s for the bourgeoise. At most bars there is no such thing as paid time off, sick days or vacation. If you’re sick and scheduled to work, it is your responsibility to find a co-worker to cover your shift. Even if you manage to get someone to cover your shift and thereby keep your job, you still lose out on the money you would have earned that night.

The holidays are the best time to make money as a bartender—especially if you offer to take all of your co-workers’ shifts so they can leave town. In big cities, there are more tourists during the holiday season than any other time of the year. And they’re all just dying to spend their holiday bonuses on food, drink and merriment (most of which you, as a bartender, can provide). Work the weekend before Christmas, Christmas Eve and New Years, and you’ll easily make two months worth of rent in cash tips alone.

Doubles. The only good thing about working two shifts back to back is the extra cash in hand and the weird, almost euphoric adrenaline rush you feel wash over you when you finally sit down after being on your feet for 12 hours straight.

You feel your eyes about to bulge out of your head as you weigh the two options with which you are faced: Go against policy, or tell the customer “no.” But the customer is always right, right? [Clenches fist, swipes cards, growls.]

This is a job, not a charity service. Giving away drinks for free is equal to stealing. While a few shots are acceptable, they need to be accounted for on a tab, which has to be paid for—usually out of the bartender’s pocket (though it’s occasionally comped by a manager). The old saying is true: Nothing in this world is really free.

You nod, say thanks, and then, when they leave, you plot your revenge.

A semi-drunk customer is almost never right. But because bartenders are such amazing hosts—and dutiful employees—they make it seem like they are.