Some of you may ask why we’d serve beer and wine when a significant portion of our customers aren’t old enough to buy it.  Serving beer and wine isn’t new to us as we had a permanent beer and wine permit for years in Broad Ripple.

Here are a few myth-busting explanations of why we’re now serving beer and wine on Friday nights after 6pm and why it won’t affect guests who don’t drink.

Q: If alcohol is not the focus of your business, why bother?

A: Many of our customers are well over the age of 21.  That jibes with the national average age for gamers being 35.

Part of their entertainment expectations when they go out is to enjoy a beer with whatever activity they choose, whether it’s bowling, golf, a sporting event or Net Heads.  Often, groups of 5 or 6 adults will want to go out on a Friday night and at least one of them wants a beer.  That person often determines – or at least influences – the destination chosen by the group.

Our experience is that our beer sales are low, but having alcohol allows those groups to include Net Heads in their choices.  In addition, they typically stay a bit longer and come in larger groups.

Q: Aren’t you afraid of over-served patrons misbehaving?  Who needs that?

A: Actually there are some counterintuitive things at work when beer is consumed at Net Heads:

• In a traditional “bar” patrons are there *only* for the beer/food.  Any other activity – watching the “game” or the other patrons – is almost always passive.  Because their hands are idle, they consume beer quickly.
• At Net Heads, guests are generally fully engaged in their game.  Consuming beer is secondary and so they drink much more slowly.
• The “bar” scene is an opportunity to focus on meeting members of the opposite sex, strut new fashions and lose inhibitions.  Alcohol facilitates working up the courage to do those things.  At Net Heads, no courage is needed to send your minions into battle and you aren’t trying to be funnier or make someone on the other side of the room look better.  Once again, alcohol consumption remains low and secondary.

Q: Don’t you believe that pushing alcohol in front of underage patrons is a problem?

A: No more so than Applebee’s.

Remember, we offer alcohol-free times before 6pm and, for the time being, we only serve on Friday nights.  There’s no bar and we don’t display alcohol related advertising of any kind.  Alcohol is served as table service only.

Q: How do you control underage drinking with so many underage patrons?

A: Actually that’s *very* simple.

Most underage drinking occurs when adult patrons purchase alcohol on a minor’s behalf.  Minors then consume the beverages in the corner of a crowded room with little or no supervision.  At Net Heads, everyone signs in with their name (whether they’re a member or not) and each guest is seated at their own station.  It is virtually impossible for minors to consume alcohol without being in full view of the staff.

Also, despite our best effort to attract women to our really fun place, our crowd is more the “guys night out” variety.  So the more conventional – and serious – problem of adult males buying alcohol for under age females is virtually nonexistent.

Q: What do you do when a guest has too much to drink?

A: In all the years we served in Broad Ripple (an alcohol related venue if there ever was one) we almost never ran into this.

We have a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate language and the same goes for any behavior that disturbs the other guests, alcohol related or not.

The one absolute advantage we have over bars is that there are no other gaming centers in Carmel or anywhere nearby.  If we ban someone, there’s really no other place they can go to play and they know that.  We get excellent cooperation from our guests.

Lastly, if it’s clear that someone is impaired, we call them a cab, like any other responsible restaurant.