1M bartenders have to be certified in California by July 1 | Hacker News Reader

1M bartenders have to be certified in California by July 1

craftybartending.com

31 pointsdeeel72 comments

Summary:

The "certification" is a 2-hour course that can be taken online. It costs $3 and lasts three years. It's a certification to pour drinks responsibly (not some sort of mixology test).

It was planned to go into effect last year but CA legislation pushed it out another year to help with transition.

Honestly, seems like a reasonable move when 18% of Californians are identified was excessively drinking. (US average 17%). [1]

[1]https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/annual/measur...

I'm disappointed by the lack of mixology portion, because it would've provided an opportunity for a real value-add of any kind. I've had simple 2-ingredient well drink orders made incorrectly at my local watering hole.

That’s something that I’m comfortable leaving up to the market to handle (in a way that safe service feels like something the market won’t address adequately).

Not realistic. This requirement applies not just to bartenders, but to anyone who takes drink orders or delivers them. Your waiter/waitress needs mixology training? Not really.

Also one must purchase the training course itself. The article recommends this $10 course: https://servingalcohol.com/california-responsible-alcohol-co...

Why do you think this course would move the needle at all on binge drinking? Overservice is already illegal. Its much more likely excessive alcohol consumption is happening at home.

On top of that, oh boy, more nanny state totally-not-prohibition-lite.

Substitute another drug for alcohol:

Should distributing powerful, dangerous, and addictive drugs not be regulated? This seems like light handed regulation to me

>Should distributing powerful, dangerous, and addictive drugs not be regulated?

Absolutely not.

>This seems like light handed regulation to me

Yes in the sense nothing interesting will likely happen except a few bureaucrats and people offering the training fatten themselves at the trough.

Woah. There's not been a requirement for responsible service of alcohol until now?

There was a requirement without training, so they're now making sure people know what to look for.

Genuinely surprising to me. An RSA certificate has been a requirement where I am in Aus for as long as I can remember. And it has consequences if it’s not followed by those who have the RSA license, too — does this bill include similar?

Spending two million hours and three million dollars every few years, plus the cost of implementation and enforcement, on a program that won’t meaningfully affect that statistic, isn’t reasonable. A pilot program testing effectiveness could have been, though.

The article says that they’ve already done the research to test effectiveness and that it did meaningfully impact the statistic. Of course, that assumes the past research was accurate, but the buck has to stop somewhere.

You can look at the studies they rely on here: https://www.abc.ca.gov/law-and-policy/regulations-rulemaking...

The first appears to be a tortured statistical analysis of a preexisting trend. The second is a qualitative assessment. The third appears to be a CDC panic piece.

That’s my assessment, at least.

In California you have do an economic impact summary for most bills over $50M in impact. They did one for this[1].

Summary below:

Costs for the typical business: initially $2,121 with $1,060 ongoing for compliance

Net benefits to state: Positive $3.5B (I'm guessing that includes some savings for less calls to police, less hospital stays, less violence, etc).

I doubt any of this is ever checked forward in time, but I'm glad they at least stated assumptions.

[1] https://www.abc.ca.gov/law-and-policy/regulations-rulemaking...

> $3.5 Billion annually

This number really needs to be scrutinized and should be public how it is calculated and what assumptions were used to compute it.

I've worked in several giant corporations which function like a small government – given the right political posture and networking, you can get pretty much any program approved. Numbers get skewed to support a number of incentives.

I've also worked in the government sector and have witnessed how $MM projects are managed, costed and approved. None of it inspires any confidence.

Does anyone have details of how this $3.5B ROI? Really, this is the meat of their argument and the people that voted for it. Often things like opportunity costs are ignored because they're difficult to calculate.

I appreciate the prompt but I read the article. The program hasn’t been pilot tested. The article referred to some studies and a meta study that CA is using to justify rolling out the entire program. The studies, in very brief summary, don’t actually find that these programs are effective, just that interventions are effective and education could theoretically lead to interventions. The studies also don’t show that these programs are bad, and in that middle state it’s better to do a real world test than to pass the bill or regulation using theoretical assumptions used to check off net impact calculations. Obviously this is tilting at windmills, given the state and the anti-drunk-driving optics in play.

> on a program that won’t meaningfully affect that statistic,

Seems like quite an assumption.

In my younger years I had several friends who became bartenders. There was a similar education campaign here that focused on the potential legal and financial implications of overserving customers or letting underage patrons in. Anecdotally, my friends became much more cautious about overserving people and much more careful about verifying IDs after that.

Although I wouldn't be surprised if the training could have been reduced to 30 minutes instead of 2 hours.

Thanks; it’s good to hear your experience. Likewise anecdotally, I’ve seen a mix of responses to this kind of training. A confounding factor, even when bartenders and managers do change behavior, is shifting of alcohol consumption location and/or timing throughout the evening, in response to strict bartending.

2 million hours (228 years) and 3 million dollars every 3 years doesn't take much to equalize out. Out of these 1 million bartenders if ~3 deaths/year were avoided as a result of this training that'd seem to about break even already and that's not even looking at any impact outside of death.

Thanks; I appreciate bringing in the statistical cost of a human life. There might not even be that improvement, and there might be a deleterious effect. Even in a positive scenario, the hours spent, and the opportunity cost on the legislative and bureaucratic side also have a cost in statistical human lives. So please keep that in mind, but you’re thinking about it in a helpful way.

I dont get how you got 2mil hours. There's 40m people in California. This seems to take 2 hours or less. Are you saying 1.25% of Californians are bartenders?

Your accusation that this could hurt seem yet again wildly vastly hard to imagine. I dont appreciate this absurd anti-governance shade-casting, with seemingly totally bogus figures. I just dont get what drives this weird afactual spin.

The article is the source of the claim and as it points out it's not "bartenders" in the traditional sense of "a person working behind a bar" it's any employee which can takes order for/serves/delivers alcohol or checks IDs or who manages/supervisors those that could in one of the 56,000 establishments licensed to do so in California. I could definitely see that being ~1% of the population, or at least a significant fraction of it.

They will have a cost as well but there is also a lot more to be saved than just statistical life saved by straight causal death too. In fact most of the cost is probably around that as dying can be much cheaper to society than longterm healthcare and loss of QALY. At best so far you seem to have placed a solid argument it could be possible it was not be worth the opportunity cost to implement and I'm not sure adding more waiting and more process is really the proposal to solve that type of concern.

On the other hand in regards to why it's unreasonable to think the program will meaningfully affect the statistic you've only provided your opinion on it against the backing provided by the legislature. However weak that backing may seem it's still stronger than a counterclaim with no alternative backing at all.

The question everyone needs to ask is why is this required and what benefit does it bring to the table?

I already have a negative reaction to this but I want to understand if I am not missing something incredibly disastrous to the society that warrants such regulatory nuissance.

Whether it costs $3 and takes 2 hours is not the thing to focus here ("Death by paper cuts").

We've got something like this in Australia, and it's really just a rubber stamp kind of process rather than a meaningful safeguard against problem drinking. Our taxes on alcohol are very high as well, especially pre-mixed drinks which I would classify as prohibitively expensive.

The end result of that; we just spend more on alcohol, drink more of it, and drink it more frequently than ever before.

The overhead of administering a program must be far more than $3. Talk about throwing more money into the incinerator.

[Unequal example not meant to draw an exact analogy: Ohio has boat registration for $25 / 3 years for kayaks and canoes. The state loses money on the registration scheme, and the overhead is basically selling a sticker. Unfortunately once these kinds of programs are started the lard that occupies these autocratic (whoops, meant bureaucratic) positions are exceptionally difficult to displace.]

So, let's just run through everything here.

1- 1 million bartenders/servers/whatever at 3 bucks a pop sets our year 1 expected return at 3 million dollars. Based on the description other people have put for the program, the state is probably just hosing a web portal with a quiz form that people fill out. Once it's built, you're probably only going to see token updates every year. I would imagine the state, over the long term, could run this for cost or a small profit, especially as you don't seem to factor enforcement fines into the revenue. Further, the page linked in the post claims that the public safety side is also factored into their costs, so reducing over-serving projects to save money overall.

2- This creates a cottage industry of 3rd party tutors. I would guarantee you that this is almost as important to the political will to create this certification as the public safety side. Someone lobbied for this because they can profit off it. Feel whatever way you want about that.

TL;dr- It's a "don't text and drive" law. It's an easy piece of "common sense" legislation that politicians can point to as proof that they're trying to help the community be safer and healthier. "Can you put a price on the safety of our state's children?" YMMV as to whether this is actually true.

So like "Smart Serve" and similar programs in other countries?

That link states West Virginia is the healthiest drinking state.

More unnecessary ridiculous bureaucracy. I grew up in California and bartend in Oregon (where a permit has been required as long as I’ve been in the industry). The permit test essentially is, “Do not serve people too much alcohol.” An incredibly pointless waste of resources. You have to re take the test every few years, you know, in case you’ve suddenly forgotten how to do your job.

Hey, those bureaucrats need to be able to keep making payments on that second house!

Crazy, I also grew up in CA and work in OR. When I read the title I thought this was a classic example of CA's government overreaching in ways OR's would never. I never would have guessed OR was first!

Even Texas requires a TABC certification to serve or deliver alcohol!

Servers need to be aware of all of the laws surrounding service, and what to watch out for wrt intoxication. Not all jobs are created equal- and that means there needs to be some baseline for training when it comes to safety that's this basic.

OLCC has a sanctioned monopoly on distributing hard liquor in the state and they constrain liquor sales more than CA though less than say UT.

I disagree. Controlled substances should have some guidelines and this seems pretty low cost and low overhead on time.

I do agree that most jobs are over licensed. From barbers to landscapers, there's generally too much paperwork. But I'm ok with something that'll help the 3rd leading cause of preventable death in the country.

It could be summarized to a one page document that you read over, with more resources as optional, and a required click of "I agree, and if I fail to do so I understand that I could be prosecuted". 3 hours seems absurd. I mean, I have to re-up like 7 similar agreements (insider trading, security, confidentiality, anti-discrimination, anti-phishing etc) at my employment and it's usually 15 minutes long or less.

Nitpick but alcohol is not a controlled substance per 21 U.S.C. § 802(6) ("The term 'controlled substance' means a drug or other substance, or immediate precursor, included in schedule I, II, III, IV, or V of part B of this subchapter. The term does not include distilled spirits, wine, malt beverages, or tobacco...").

whoa, you're right.

thanks for the nitpick, I didn't realize Ethanol wasn't actually on the Federal Schedules.

It's a very nice bonus to whatever companies the state has allowed to issue these certifications. More jobs for those companies, who could argue against that?! Hey I bet some of them are even friends with the governor! :)

>Hey I bet some of them are even friends with the governor! :)

Friends of legislators no doubt. Friends of the governor have better opportunities.

People in a few hundred years are going to laugh about the laws created in late stage liberalism. The frenzy and idiocy makes things like beard taxes seem reasonable

Not in 100 hundred years, by then they will be busy hunting and fighting. But in 500 years, when they will have universities and history departments again, yes, our age will be an eternal source of amusement.

What will they call this age?

The age of plastic? Because of the traces we leave

The age of poison? Because of the large variety of noxious chemicals we put in so many of our products?

The selfish age? Because of all the dangerous waste we are leaving behind to satisfy our consumption needs

Perhaps the Age of Stupid. I am going with that. We live in the Age of Stupid

Hard disagree. If you need more convincing, please review the drunk-driving fatality stats.

I agree that you should know all of the local laws surrounding alcohol. However, it costs a fair amount of money and you basically have to sit through a classroom/video lecture training course every 3 years. I can read the law myself and pass the test easily, I don't want to give a bunch of money to random bureaucrats/cronies for no reason. California has a much lower rate of alcoholism than Oregon, and got by just fine without these pointless certifications/licenses.

When i bartended in Illinois the training was quite eye opening to 21 year-old me. I don't know that anyone else[1] would have told me all the ways i could be jailed, dined, and/or bankrupted from various common bar situations. I don't know that small establishments have the resources to properly find and provide that training either. That knowledge armed me to resist an awful lot of persuasion that I would have bent the house rules for.

Refreshers are nice too because they also have updated info. The second time I did my training I found out that they were relaxing some rules around special events and what was allowed where. Very useful considering the bar was in the middle of where a lot of street fest stuff occured. [2]

1. at the time and place it was the municipal authorities mandating participation, but the material was provided by the state

2. Again, this w as put on by local authorities so it included city zoning and licensing info too.

California occupational licensing strikes again. Just like the handyman who can’t do jobs > $500 (including materials). There’s a dead spot in that market between $500-$5000 which is the minimum most GCs will do work on.

No dead spot, just unlicensed handymen

Handymen who can be forced out of their jobs or at least given a massive financial problem at the discretion of a bureaucrat or enforcement official and are therefore dependent on the good graces of those entities for their income.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Where would we be without the government putting their fingers into every little thing.

The workforce size in CA is 18M.

1 in 18 workers in CA serve alcohol? How?

Go to a bar and you’ll find out

Best comment.

From the article, it includes people I wouldn't have thought of:

According to California’s Assembly Bill 122, alcohol servers are defined as anyone who:

- Checks IDs for alcohol consumption or entry into a licensed establishment - Takes alcoholic beverage orders - Pours alcoholic beverages - Serves/delivers alcoholic beverages to patrons

All of the above are required to be licensed according to the new law.

Furthermore, any managers and supervisors are also required to become licensed. A manager/supervisor is anyone who:

- Directly hires or oversees alcohol servers - Trains alcohol servers how to bartend (including how to check IDs and/or when to refuse service to patrons)

"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 644,100 bartenders working in the US in 2018. That number is forecasted to grow faster than most jobs, rising 8% between 2018 and 2028."

So apparently California has all of them, plus extras.

The requirement also applies to waiters at restaurants that serve alcohol, baristas that serve alcohol, bouncers, etc

There are 1.8 million waiters in the entire US. 171,630 in California.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm

The 1 million number still doesn't add up.

You think there's only 118M people in California?

Anyone in the chain from storage to the table is involved, including servers, managers, etc.

And ID checkers. Think security (commonly referred to as bouncers).

According go the bureau of labor statistics there are 1.8m people in the entire country who quality as servers and another 720k who are bartenders. Again, that's the whole country.

California as a whole has 60k bartenders and 171k waiters/waitresses- and that includes places that don't serve alcohol.

Does waiters/waitresses include places with counter service? A lot of them serve beer.

Texas has long had something like this but its main purpose has been to protect the establishment from any liability. All servers have to be certified. If something goes wrong they are the liable party not the business. CYA...

What a ludicrous nanny law. This covers not only bartenders but also any servers, bouncers, waiters, food runners, managers, and more. Essentially, if you work in a restaurant with alcohol you’ll need to be certified. Why? Reasons.

Because it's effective and relatively cheap and easy.

But why?

From the article

Why is California Requiring Training? According to the state of California, studies have shown that mandated alcohol server training has led to a reduction in drunk driving accidents and alcohol involved accidents, and that excessive drinking costs the economy billions of dollars every year.

Therefore, the state of California believes that required training is overall beneficial to bartenders, patrons, and the local economy.

The study from that link[0] that the CA government used to justify this law is BS. Huge garden of forking paths issue. I mean this doesn't exactly inspire confidence:

> After following the iterative identification, estimation, and diagnosis model-building strategy of Box and Jenkins (1976), the following model was obtained: [Followed by a very complex equation with no justification for its structural form].

If I can iteratively generate a model that uses arbitrary combinations of arbitrary variables until I get to statistical significance, I can prove anything. That, plus the 23% decrease of nighttime vehicle deaths they attribute to this law is simply implausibly large. Per NHTSA, alcohol was involved in 40% of fatal accidents in 1990. Meaning it somehow stopped on the order of half of alcohol-related auto deaths in Oregon. That's magical thinking for an intervention like this.

0: https://www.abc.ca.gov/law-and-policy/regulations-rulemaking...

Good way for the state to collect excessive fines from people and businesses

Whose friend of a politician runs this stuff?

Holy crap, I'm on mobile and I couldn't read anything because of the banners and ads.

That renders the issue nicely, metaphorically speaking.

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