Will COVID Changes the Public Conceptualization of What Constitutes "Acceptable" Drinking Hours?

It seems to be a social norm everywhere in the productive world that imbibing alcohol is an after-hours activity. Because people are generally consigned to work during the day, drinking before dinner during weekdays is frowned upon as the behavior of the unemployed alcoholic. And in a world where many proscribe to the idea that a good day off is a productive day off (in a sense of getting hobbies and other things done outside of paid work), drinking while there is still sunlight out on the weekends is not exactly the most socially acceptable behavior either.

That is until COVID changed drinking hours. Restrictions on serving alcohol past 8 pm during much of Japan's state of emergency meant that many little neighborhood bars, if they decided to remain open, decided to move their opening hours earlier. Bars that used to be open from 7 pm now do so at 4 pm or earlier so that people can get tipsy before the inevitable last call when dinner service is about to end. Even though these bars saw decidedly fewer customers during the height of the pandemic, surprisingly, people are turning up to drink at 4 pm.

Japan is certainly not unique in the shifting drinking hours since the pandemic. Many countries, with their public social life ravaged by draconian, on-and-off lockdowns, likely faced much more difficulties in having people knocking back a few drinks. Those who are really keen probably started their own little at-home bars. With bottles of liquors lining up in the kitchen and on the windowsill, and no one watching one's behavior in the confines of the private home, there are just no social inhibitions to start drinking whatever whenever.

As COVID subsides and restrictions are dropped in a bid to live with COVID in the long term, bars are gradually going to normal pre-COVID hours. But it remains to be seen whether the drinking behaviors of their average clientele go back to their normal pre-COVID ways. A casual observation here in Japan of a few bars that have been in operations at shortened hours throughout the pandemic restrictions show that as hours go back to normal, more people are showing up in earlier hours, even as the overall number of customers increase throughout all hours.

But for some bars that have been reopening more recently, the trends indicate that later hours are still the real moneymakers in the post-COVID world. Even at 8 pm or 9 pm on a Friday night, some bars remain largely empty, with their staff members saying that the real crowds do not show up until way past 10 pm. While some of that talk could just be a face-saving or a marketing measure to get more people to come to meet other people past 10 pm, there should be a kernel of truth in the statements. Whereas people were rushing to get drinks in before closing hours in the past months, they no longer appear to hurry.

The question is just how a new working arrangement employers are reaching with their employees further influences the behavior of bar-goers. In some ways, remote workers have more flexible schedules, enabling them to patronize bars more frequently provided that their income does not go down with the number of working hours. But on the flip side, remote workers have fewer occasions to socialize, meaning that they are less likely to go out drinking with friends and colleagues, and thus making the idea of going out less attractive in the first place.

Perhaps as bars seek to read how the concept of drinking "acceptability" changes in the post-COVID world, there need to actively diversify in terms of business. Serving alcohol and bar snacks, as they used to before the pandemic, is no longer good enough to get people into the door, in whatever operating hours. Instead, more value-added, whether it be showing sports matches, hosting events, having more substantial food menus, and renovating the premises to make them more attractive to a wider clientele needing comfort rather than drunkenness, can all be considered as business development strategies.

Indeed, as part of that business development, there is a unique chance for bar owners to change the conceptualization of "acceptability" as COVID changes how people think and drink. As people become more willing to defy government recommendations on how to adjust their daily lives to protect themselves from the virus, bars can put themselves in a position of encouraging people to show their individuality through consumption of alcohol (and all that they sell) without being openly defiant. Keeping earlier hours may certainly help.