Editorial: Bar stunts a lot to handle

OPINION: The return of students to Waikato University and Wintec always brings with it a bevy of promotions and stunts from bars determined to attract their share of the student dollar.

Last week it was Hamilton bar Agenda promoting live goldfish in shots of alcohol and this week Bar 101 is offering rewards to the first 100 people to drink six handles of beer.

Agenda bottled it after SPCA threats of legal action and a police visit helped persuade it to let the goldfish be. In the end, customers got a free shot of alcohol plus a chocolate fish and the bar got heaps of publicity – including stories in the Waikato Times and on television.

Bar 101, meanwhile, is this week offering the first 100 drinkers who down six handles, equating to two and half litres of beer, the chance to get themselves a T-shirt.

Those first 100 then get handles for only $4 for the rest of the year when they wear their T-shirt at Bar 101, as well as going into the draw to win a prize pack valued at more than a thousand dollars.

Owner John Lawrenson said people weren't being asked to drink the six handles in one sitting, and the promotion was designed to get people to come in more than once a week.

"We wouldn't allow people to drink six in one sitting. That is why we have a stamped card for people to bring in throughout the week. It is designed to be monitored."

However, he's being ever so slightly disingenuous. The promotion's aim is to get people drinking more, and no card system – however well intentioned – is going to stop someone from drinking the six in one night. It's more a move designed to placate licensing officials.

As Mr Lawrenson said in this newspaper last week while talking about O Week, it's about branding: "You come out of O Week and hopefully you've got 1000 students wearing a Bar 101 T-shirt and in the next couple of months when students go to town and think `where shall we go, Bar 101 was going off in O Week, let's go there'."

The students aren't too worried, some telling us that six handles in one hit – even after drinking at home first – is nothing out of the ordinary.

And there's the problem we face: New Zealand's drinking culture remains focused on heavy consumption.

These types of stunts, while nothing new, walk a fine line between promoting the bars in question and the excessive consumption of alcohol, which is illegal.

Late last year Hamilton's Bahama Hut bar lost its licence for seven days as a penalty for two drinking promotions which allowed customers to pay up front and drink as much as they could in a six-hour period.

That is pure madness. It many ways, we're still stuck with the six o'clock swill attitude – get a lot down you and fast.

These kinds of promotions won't help change that.

- © Fairfax NZ News