Public for drink special regulation in Fargo: City leaders show little support

FARGO - Once a business tactic, the drink special has become a battleground, at least in Grand Forks. Here, city leaders are unfazed.
“We’re not seeing the extreme drink specials that we used to see before,” said Fargo Police Chief Dave Todd, echoing a position held by many.
Even if specials were a bigger issue in Fargo, Todd said he’d hesitate to advocate for what’s been proposed in Grand Forks.
Though discussion on the issue was delayed until next month, the Grand Forks City Council is considering an ordinance that would outlaw three so-called “extreme” specials: unlimited drinks for a fixed price or no cost, three-for-ones, and games or contests that focus on alcohol consumption.
“I’m real hesitant to try to control prices on a commodity that’s legal,” Todd said. “What I’m more interested in is addressing behavior,” such as over-serving.
Fargo’s Liquor Control Board briefly discussed regulation of drink specials in late 2010, but despite a push from then-Chief Keith Ternes, the talk went nowhere. Neither bar owners nor the public were supportive, and bar owners said they’d be able to skirt almost any ordinance the city passed by changing the way they worded specials.
The board ultimately left it up to bars to self-regulate, and some say that’s been successful.
“They’ve kind of reined it in,” said board member and city auditor Steve Sprague. “We don’t see that same discounting like we had before.”
“There’s still a few out there but not, boy, back five or so years ago, there was quite a few,” Deputy Chief Joe Anderson said. “It seemed like every bar had, whether it was a ladies’ night or men’s night or all-you-can-drink night.”
Anderson recalls people regularly passing out on bar property and fighting in parking lots. “We were dealing with quite a few of those issues,” he said.
That’s not to say there are no extreme specials.
There are 50-cent taps on Wednesday at Borrowed Buck’s Roadhouse, free drinks for ladies on Thursday at the Windbreak, and a host of two-for-ones and $1 drinks at other spots on certain nights. On Friday at the Old Broadway, tap beers cost the date in cents.
But bars used to offer such specials almost every night of the week, said Randy Thorson, owner of a number of restaurants and bars in North Dakota and Minnesota, including the Old Broadway. Such offers are now occasional.
Sprague and others attribute that shift to conversations with the board and good business sense.
“They don’t want to just give away their product that they make their living on,” he said.
Thorson said that’s not the reason for the change, though.
“If I didn’t make money, I wouldn’t be doing it,” said Thorson, who also owns Vinyl Taco, which offers $1 margaritas on Fridays. “Our hope is that they stay and dance and actually drink at full price sometime.”
Thorson agreed the market has shifted, but said it’s because of changing customer tastes and the closing of competitor bars. And today, specials remain one way to compete in a bar-saturated marketplace.
“Everyone wants to stay in business, so they begin the discounting,” he said. “Everyone has to pay their bills, pay their staff.”
Thorson objected to the notion that drink specials are to blame for binge drinking or misconduct.
“We still monitor it, and we’ll cut you off,” he said. “Even though it’s cheap doesn’t mean you can keep drinking and drinking and drinking.”
Experts, however, say cheap alcohol is a proven contributor to over-drinking.
“We know that price does make a difference when it comes to consumption and that the lower the price is, the higher the consumption,” said Robyn Litke Sall, alcohol misuse prevention coordinator at Fargo Cass Public Health.
Litke Sall pointed out that Fargo-Moorhead was No. 1 in binge drinking out of 187 metro areas in 2012, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, and said a policy limiting specials “could potentially reduce the societal harms associated with the misuse of alcohol.”
Police officers, too, raise a flag when they see extreme drink specials.
“We let those entities know we will be walking through their establishments more than we usually would,” Todd said. “And they’ve been cooperative with that.”
Even if Todd were like his predecessor, who had fewer reservations about price controls, there was little support for the proposal in 2010 and likely little support now, Litke Sall said.
“I think it would take a coalition to come together to try to move something like this forward, and there just isn’t a strong coalition right now that I’m aware of in our community.”