“I used to work four days. I’m down to one day,” said James O’Toole, a bartender at Dudley’s Parkview Tavern in New Rochelle, who has taken another job driving a limousine. “From last summer to this summer, coming into this season, business is off by at least 45 percent. … The bar is empty.”

At the Willett House Restaurant in Port Chester, manager Dennis Gallagher said the ban landed a one-two-three punch. Revenues plunged — he said he lost an estimated $50,000 in June 2003, the first month of the ban — which forced him to put his by-the-hour bartenders on the payroll to make up their lost tips. And the business he ran selling cigars at the bar has closed.

“From a health standpoint and from an economic standpoint, the law has made a tremendous amount of sense and has been an overwhelming success,” said Rick Lepkowski, vice president of the Westchester chapter of the American Cancer Society. “Culturally, most people are a lot less tolerant of being in places where people do smoke. In terms of education and the cultural acceptability of smoking, I believe we’ve really turned a corner.”

(It’s not very often that The American Cancer Society admits their goal is to spread intolerance, but here it is in black and white.)

Source: Lohud.com. Link expired.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2005 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Bars/Taverns, Job Loss, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.