Where Have All the Buybacks Gone?
They’re the four words every regular loves to hear: “This one’s on me.” Whether it’s an extra pint of Guinness or a free Gin & Tonic, a buyback—the practice of giving the occasional drink on the house to a well-liked patron on a loosely regulated cadence—has been a time-honored tradition of American bar culture since at least the repeal of Prohibition nearly a century ago.
But gradually, over the past 25 years, the once reliable cultural norm has become, to some, a relic of a bygone era. As far back as 1999, news outlets have pondered whether tighter profit margins and declining bar patronage have spelled the end of the friendly freebie. Recently, bartender and writer Rick Paulas suggested in a post on X that the concept had “suddenly died” and wondered, “What happened!” Has the buyback truly gone the way of the $5 boilermaker? And if so, how are bartenders keeping customers coming back for another round?
Paulas, a bartender at Oak & Iron in Brooklyn, first heard about buybacks while he was still living in Los Angeles, from friends who had spent time in New York. “It was always something that was dangling there as this fable: In New York City, if you go there and get three drinks, the fourth one is for free.”
But now, he says, “the word buyback has lost a lot of usage.” At his bar, free drinks are “vibes based” and dependent on the sales for the day. To him, the concept lost its charm when social media made these if-you-know-you-know traditions more widespread: “It kind of went away when all the secrets became not-so-secret anymore.”
Other bartenders cite economic factors for the decline in regularly comping drinks; many repeated some form of the adage “Don’t give away the bar.” Erin Gerety, a Richmond, Virginia, bartender with more than a decade of experience, says that one of her bars, the neighborhood watering hole Home Sweet Home, is “so cheap to drink at that it feels silly to give things away for free.” She hadn’t heard the term “buyback” before our conversation, but she was familiar with the practice in general. “That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally pour a shot a little heavy for a friend,” she clarified. “But I don’t do it very often.”
For Matt Grimm, a bartender at the famed Chicago dive bar Rainbo Club, the fastest way to ensure you won’t get a buyback is “if you ask for one because ‘it’s my birthday’ or ‘it’s my friend’s birthday,’” he says. “If I buy drinks for everyone whose birthday it was, we’d be losing money.”
Mike Sternfeld, who works at Shenanigans Pub in Kensington, Brooklyn (where I also work!), has put in nearly 20 years behind the bar. To him, the buyback began to lose its potency when bars began to process credit cards. He recalled the register at the original location of Freddy’s Bar—which was tragically demolished to build the Barclay’s Center in 2010—had just three buttons to ring in drinks: liquor, beer, and buybacks. At that time, he says, it was expected for 10 percent of your “ring,” or total daily revenue, to be buybacks.
But fees for processing credit cards, along with the costs associated with point-of-sale software like Toast and Square, began to cut into the bottom line. “It costs more to do the commerce, so there’s less room for freebies,” says Sternfeld. And whereas cash-based buybacks leave customers with more money to tip their bartender at the end of the night, credit card freebies have the inverse effect, cutting into the subtotal that most customers will use as the basis for calculating gratuity.
In the absence of the traditional buyback, bars are still finding ways to keep customers coming back. Rainbo Club will often invite regulars to private events, like its annual Kentucky Derby party, where they’ll give away free drinks and host a backyard potluck. One of Gerety’s fellow bartenders at Home Sweet Home keeps a “prize bucket” filled with dollar trinkets like heart-shaped sunglasses, finger puppets, and lipgloss that she will dole out to particularly affable patrons. At The Jasper, a cocktail bar she also works at, bartenders give out a flat 20 percent friends and family discount, and pour pre-bottled shooters for fellow industry workers.
For Sternfeld at Shenanigans, the role of a bartender as a social interlocutor is its own reward: “It’s really personality management: You’re trying to get all these strangers to socialize [and] to utilize this space as they want,” he says, “and you’re trying to make a judgment call as to what level they want to interact and how you’re going to make that as comfortable as possible to hopefully get a better tip and to keep them coming back.”
Still, all the bartenders I spoke to say they continue to reward the people who make bars fun, sociable, and safe spaces with free drinks in one form or another, whether it’s a shot for the road or a draft beer on the house. “I think it is a crucial practice. It invites community; it breaks the ice,” says Gerety. “When I see a real slice of humanity, I get to say, ‘Good job, you get a gold star.’”