this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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For people too young to remember, a lot of people were against smoking bans. The argument was pretty simple: "Why not let the market decide? If you want to go to a bar with no smokers, go to one that doesn't allow smoking." This was persuasive to a lot of people.
But I recall that non-smoking bars were extremely rare and I would always end up smelling like smoke every time I went to the bar. The problem was basically that going to a non-smoking bar would exclude any friends that smoked, so bars that became non-smoking were limiting themselves to only those patrons who didn't smoke themselves and had no one in their group who did.
In hindsight, it betrays a fundamental problem with the "let the market decide" argument: there are situations where a small number of consumers with uncommon preferences can end up altering the whole market such that the majority of consumers are forced into un-ideal purchases. In the case of smoking at bars, it was actually better to say "Hey you few people who smoke, you're kinda fucking up everything and we do actually need big government to step in and stop you from doing that."
In the UK, most places had a non-smoking section (even restaurants 🤮) which was just part of the same room. No barriers or anything. The whole place stank no matter where you sat
Same in the US. And it wasn't hard to get seated at a non-smoking table right next to the smoking section since there was no space between the tables or anything.
Airplanes were even worse.
Opposite of how people with allergies changed the market. Sure maybe a group of people are without allergies but a very large group are with various allergies. If you broke them down they’d be smaller groups but it made more sense to just accommodate. And you can’t really tell someone with an allergy to just stop having the allergy. Though some restaurants will deny it should be part of their culture or unheard of.
I liked the no-smoking in bars even when i smoked. But pulling an archived post with 13 points and 100 comments to display prominent opinion is pretty fun times.
I actually started with the Dennis Miller rant on it because that's what I thought of first, but then I realized Dennis Miller sucks and I don't want to make people sit through that so I searched for someone else arguing it...
Dennis Miller's downfall was swift and prophetic.