Now I know bartenders have to not over serve a customer as well as not let a clearly drunk customer drive home, they even have to take courses/get a license to serve.
Say a drunk customer at the end of the night goes to leave (the bartender knows they plan on driving) at that point the bartender should say to the drunk customer “hey I cant let you drive home, you have to call a ride/walk/ or we will even call an Uber for you”
but let’s say the customer refuses and does not comply? Is the bartender supposed to just take the car keys anyway and not let them leave? What is the bartender supposed to do?
In: Economics
In Ontario, the law skews pretty heavily towards blaming the bartender and the bar who served the drunk. If a bartender serves someone and they kill someone, the bartender is liable too. There’s obviously a big difference between giving someone one drink and giving someone 9, but in basically every case the bartender has some.liability.
As an example from my own restaurant life, a customer came into one or our rivals’ restaurants and had 3 beers and garlic bread over a 1 hour period, perfectly in line with smart serve when this happened back in 2011. The customer had been drinking at home beforehand and the bartender didn’t know, and now the customer was drunk from the 3 more beers. Visibly intoxicated, the bartender wouldn’t let the guy drive home and drove him home himself, getting a cook to drive the guy’s car home too. They drop the guy at home, watch him go in his door, and leave. He waited for them to leave and then got in his car and went for McDonald’s, and killed 2 kids on the drive. Had a BAC of .7 at the station and it was argued there was no way someone that drunk hadn’t shown signs of intoxication when the bartender served them. Bartender almost went to jail, but luckily they had tape. They showed he wasn’t visibly intoxicated when he came in.
Another example, 9 young men go into a bar with no visible signs of intoxication and have their first round, a beer and a shot each. One of them immediately gets in a fight with another patron and throws him through a second-story window. Guy gets a broken back. Bartender spent a year in prison and both the bartender and the business had a 250k fine. That was the only drinks they had had that night btw.
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