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 almost every state, bartenders who serve customers who are already intoxicated open themselves up to both civil and criminal penalties. But the laws are about serving. I’m not sure any state has a law that requires the bartender, or anyone else, to physically prevent the customer from driving away.
But the customer getting into an accident is one sure way for the bartender’s mistake (in overserving) to come to the attention of the authorities, so the bartender does have a vested interest in preventing that person from driving drunk. Yes, they offer to call a rideshare, keep the customer’s car safe, etc. Doing anything physical would probably be going too far, but the bartender could always call the police and report that an intoxicated patron is about to drive away.
The whole thing is a textbook example of an “imperfect duty.” We legally demand that bartenders not serve customers to the point of intoxication, as if people go to bars for any other reason. (Can you imagine a bar even staying in business if it limited drinks to 1 per hour?) We pretend that there’s no gap–an enormous one, for some people–between a BAC of 0.08 and being so drunk the bartender cuts them off. We allow bars to be built in locations with no transportation other than cars, even though it absolutely guarantees a certain amount of drunk driving. I don’t envy this part of a bartender’s job.
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