Aaaarrrgghhh!

I wrote this yesterday — and a lot longer than this — but failed to save it before Mozilla crashed on me. I’ll try again, and be briefer this time.

Check out the last of this bunch of letters from Monday’s page. The one by Carl Zwerling of Irmo. OK, to make it easy, I’ll excerpt it:

Nonsmoking diners unite. Boycott any restaurant that allows any
smoking, even in separate sections. If our state legislators do not
fight the tobacco lobbies (those  donations from the lobbyists must be
quite lucrative), we, the diners, must take it upon ourselves to compel
our restaurants to make the proper and healthy decision to ban smoking.

Maybe if the restaurant owners took it upon themselves to ban
smoking and advertised that their establishments were nonsmoking, they
might be pleasantly surprised to discover how much the bottom line of
their business increased because of the multitude of nonsmoking diners
who swarmed to their smoke-free atmosphere.

Have you ever noticed that nonsmokers greatly outnumber smokers in restaurants?

How about, instead of a boycott per se, some positive economic action to encourage restaurants to go smokeless? I’m not exactly against passing laws to this effect, but why should that be necessary? Why doesn’t the market better serve the needs of nonsmokers?

As a colleague mentioned today, the problem with nonsmokers is that they are so passive, and act as individuals rather than banding together. We may quietly give our custom to smoke-free eating establishments. We may even complain about being choked to death in another restaurant’s "nonsmoking section." (How can any part of a room or building be smoke-free if part of it allows smoking? Airlocks? I haven’t seen anybody try that yet, and it sounds like a lot of unnecessary capital expense when you could just ban smoking.)

But we don’t get together and share information, or tout clean-air restaurants in a way that gets a movement going, and demonstrates to investors that they should open more such establishments.

It seems like the math is there. Only about a fourth of all adults smoke, yet they seem to rule the world when you walk into any place where they are allowed to do their thing. While some nonsmokers don’t mind the smoke, I would wager that most nonsmokers would choose the place with the clean air if given a choice. So why hasn’t the market met that demand? I can only think the demand hasn’t made itself obvious enough.

And how about bars? I’m not what you’d call a bar-hopper, nor do I recommend it to anyone else. But where else can you go to hear live music in an intimate setting? You pretty much have to go to a place where drinks are served, and those places are always unpleasantly smoky.

One of my colleagues suggested this morning (obviously, from these two references, I brought up the subject) that the subset of smokers and the subset of drinkers correlate. I admit they may overlap (I even know of some people who only smoke when they drink), but there are an awful lot more of us who would enjoy a pint of draft (and in my case, no more) while listening to a good combo play a set, and would appreciate being able to breathe while doing so.

Of course, I’m not the type that bars would make a lot of money from. I would only want the one pint, I would probably only stay for a few songs, and I would only do any of this on rare occasion — such as, when I know someone in the band. I can’t imagine being a "regular" at any nightspot. I like to stay home and read too much — if I ever get the time to do that.

Maybe the subsets of smokers and heavy drinkers do correlate. Maybe bars depend financially on all-around addictive personalities. If so, that’s depressing.

If not, my question remains: Why haven’t I ever been in a smoke-free bar?