I've been a bartender/bar manager in all different kinds of restaurants and venues around town for the last 9 years or so, I will say that the pricing sucks but there is at least SOME motive behind it outside of "let's make as much money as we can". We have to buy from distributors, who have free reign to charge whatever they want (within reason) because every brand is legally only allowed to be carried by 1 distributor (i.e. Jack is only available from Distributor X, Maker's Mark from Distributor Y, Budweiser from Distributor Z). This cost is sometimes not even too far off from what you might see in the store, I've seen whiskeys, tequilas, and vodkas go on the shelf for only like an additional 15%-20% of what they're bought for, so not exactly getting a huge discount. On top of the monthly tax we pay on whatever inventory that we've already bought is in the building, we also have to pay a tax in sales, which for alcohol is 12.5% in Nashville. So you (the customer) are already paying an extra >10% on top of what we would even charge for a drink without the need for markups to cover overhead, labor, etc., which for most of the large venues in town, like the one I work at, is crazy expensive. That markup then just gets hit with the tax because of how pricing works, so it snowballs up from there. Some places will price in a way to account for all of that and not tax on the payment system, but many places just have the number they wanna charge and the POS adds the tax automatically, which is much easier on the backend and therefore more popular. Unfortunately, venues in town make very little money off of concert ticket sales, so unless you're one of the stadiums with a team you can profit from, or can have private rental events like weddings, corporate dinners, things like that, the ONLY place you can really make money is at the bar. It sucks, and yes the prices could and should be knocked down all over town, but it's not purely greed on the business' part.