Since 2017, the bar and nightclub industry in the United States has been growing by about 3% each year. However, in 2022, demand for bars and nightclubs increased by 14.6% in a single year! These days, people spend more than $36.5 billion at bars and other establishments every year in the United States alone!
These numbers are clear proof of how much value people get out of having a great local bar they can go to from time to time. However, people don’t always realize how much they value their local bar until it is gone. In part, this is because they never realize how many good reasons there are to support local bars.
Understanding more about the benefits of supporting your local bar can help you make a priority of it in the future. So why should you support your local bar?
Read on to learn all about the biggest reasons that supporting local bars is worth your time and money!
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Support the Local Economy
In many ways, supporting your local bar is a great way to support yourself in the long run. This is a principle that applies to supporting all kinds of businesses around your community.
When you visit your local bar, the money you spend there ends up cycling back to the local economy. In the long run, that can even have an effect on the security of your job in the local area. When everyone supports local bars and establishments, there is a higher chance that more businesses will open up and more jobs will become available.
Preserve Your Unique Drinking Establishments
Another big reason to support your local bar is so that you can continue to have the unique experiences that only local bars provide. If your local bar starts struggling to attract customers, there is a good chance that it will be replaced later on.
In a lot of cases, it won’t be replaced by a new local bar with exciting ideas. Instead, it will be replaced by a chain bar that provides the same experience in hundreds or thousands of locations around the country. Although there is nothing wrong with such establishments, they reduce the amount of variety available to people who go bar hopping.
After all, people don’t just go to bars to get an alcoholic beverage. You can make your own alcoholic drinks at home if you want. However, that won’t be enough to provide the experience of enjoying a night out at local drinking establishments.
At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with making some great adult beverages at home on occasion. You can click for rum Pina Colada recipes and drinking tips to learn more about how to have a bar experience in your own home.
Support the Broader Local Community
We have already discussed how supporting your local bar is a good way to support the entire local economy. However, your local bar is also connected to the broader cultural community.
For example, new music groups that form often look to local bars for opportunities to perform. As local bars disappear, that makes it more difficult for music to flourish as well. The same basic principle applies to the creations of local artists as well.
Bars are popular places for people all around the city to congregate and share ideas and experiences together. Without local bars, music, art, and other parts of your local culture may begin to stagnate.
In the short run, that may just look like having a lot of the same things in your city that other cities have. In the long run, you will start to feel more and more how dull the local scene becomes without a flourishing local culture.
Enjoy Better Service in the Long Run
One of the best things about local bars is that they often employ the same people for many years or even decades. In some cases, many different members of the same few families end up working at the local bar over the course of many years. That also means that people tend to build up meaningful relationships with the people that they see at the local bar from time to time.
It is easy to see how these kinds of relationships can lead to better service. After all, if you have a friendly long-term relationship with the people who work at the local bar, they will be more inclined to provide you with their best service.
However, it can be harder to articulate the other advantages of these kinds of community relationships. People who move to big cities and lose them often reminisce about how much it meant to them to see the same people over and over again at local bars and other establishments.
Maintain the Benefits of Local Competition
Another reason to support your local bar is to keep a healthy sense of competition going in your city. When several unique bars are competing for customers, they are always looking for new ways to make better experiences for them. That often means looking for ways they can add value to the community or provide something that is missing.
On the other hand, chain bars are more likely to be doing whatever every other member in the chain is doing across the country.
Know the Top Reasons to Support Your Local Bar
A lot of people never stop to think about how much value they get out of having a quality local bar in town. It is worth thinking about it and taking the steps necessary to preserve this part of your local community culture. If you are not careful, you might not realize how much you value your local bar until it is gone, and too late to get back.
To learn more about the latest information in bars, business, and more, take a look at our other articles!
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