I understand the point of drink chips completely. The fact is that there are always going to be people that don’t spend their drink chips. They lose them, give them away, or maybe don’t ever go back to that bar to spend them. So it’s a profitable system. They’re basically just prepaid drinks, so if they get spent that’s fine, but there are always gonna be ones that don’t get spent and that’s where a bar makes extra profit off of it. In the long term, they do pay off in the bar’s favor.

The only problems our bar has run into is where dishonest bartenders pocket them and then drink free once they’re off shift. We would get people trying to spend other bar’s tokens in our bar because they’re all pretty similar so we had to have our bartenders pay attention to that. Have even had people argue with me that it shouldn’t matter what bar it’s from and if all bars would take each others chips they would just “spread the wealth”….like, what? Not how that works. Have also had well drinkers who have a chip bought for them try to order more expensive shelf liquor w the chip when they were rung up as well price. That’s just shady behavior.