A bar manager in East Lansing, Michigan, explained why some bars accept obviously phony IDs:
It’s capitalism in action. Running a bar in a college town is a very competitive business. Students can be very fickle, they love your place one year and then think that it’s “radically out of it” the next. But you always have the option of “going loose” on carding [not closely checking IDs], and when you do that, pretty soon lots of kids who can’t get into other places start showing up and paying full price for drinks … .
Sure, you run a risk, but you didn’t make the fake IDs, the kids did, and you just were trusting human nature when they showed it to you and you believed them. At least that’s what you tell the authorities if they bust you, and you hope that they believe you.
Even when law enforcement agents crack down on bars and liquor stores selling alcohol to underage clients, often they cannot obtain a conviction. In Columbus, Ohio, on the Saturday night of the 1998 Ohio State-Penn State football game, the police raided an out-of-control party, and, subsequently, the authorities went after the distributor who sold thirty-nine kegs of beer to the student party-givers. The headline in the Columbus Dispatch related the outcome: “CASE AGAINST BEER VENDOR IS DOWN DRAIN WHEN NO ONE SHOWED UP TO TESTIFY ABOUT KEGS SOLD FOR PARTY.” A story in that paper the previous week headlined, “NO ID NEEDED TO BUY BEER [in Columbus]. MANY STORES DON’T ASK, STUDY FINDS,” and the lead began, “Minors in Franklin County can buy beer more easily than they can buy cigarettes.”
In fact, the consumption of alcohol is much more socially acceptable at the beginning of the twenty-first century than is smoking. Corporate America promotes alcohol much more assiduously than it does tobacco, and with marketing strategies more pernicious and effective than were the Miller Lite ex-jocks and Spuds MacKenzie in the 1980s.
The campus drinking environment has changed noticeably since the 1980s. Brewing companies, once heavily visible and sponsoring many campus events and activities, now maintain a more subtle presence.
—The Center for Science in the Public Interest
The amount of money that alcohol beverage companies spend pitching their products to college students has increased significantly since the 1980s; however, they have traded in their old advertising vehicles for new and sleeker ones. Instead of the full-page Bud Light and Miller Lite ads in student newspapers, readers now find publicity for local bars (often these ads are “co-ops,” paid for by the bar, the local beer distributor, or the national company). In addition, because most college dorms, Greek houses, and off-campus apartments are now wired for cable TV, and because college students watch ESPN, ESPN2, MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central more than any other channels, the national brewers advertise heavily on these networks and reach college students in this way. Moreover, for the first time in broadcast history, liquor companies now promote their products on TV, most frequently on Comedy Central. And the national magazines most read by college students—Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN The Magazine—contain many pages of beer and liquor ads.
But the alcohol beverage companies are not the only part of corporate America promoting student drinking. In its 1998 back-to-school catalogue, Abercrombie & Fitch—a clothing brand popular with contemporary undergraduates—had a section called “Drinking 101,” with recipes for such concoctions as a “Woo-Woo” and a “Brain Hemorrhage.” In addition, A&F arranged photos of these drinks and others in a circular chart that, with a spinner, functioned as a drinking game (spin and land on the photo of the Brain Hemorrhage, and toss one down). Groups like M.A.D.D. criticized A&F for the “Drinking 101” section, and, in so doing, they fell into the advertisers’ trap of transforming paid material into a free news story, attracting far more attention to the catalogue than it normally receives, and making it a must-see item on many campuses.
In the words of the East Lansing bar manager, the A&F ploy is “capitalism, in action,” and when critics of binge drinking attack this social problem, not only must they consider the deeply entrenched collegiate subculture that nurtures and promotes heavy alcohol consumption, but also the wider society that supports this activity in a multitude of ways, including joking about the risks, such as calling a highly potent drink a Brain Hemorrhage.
Because massive advertising, direct and indirect, produces excellent sales, the rate of student alcohol consumption increased every year in the 1990s, and it shows no signs of slowing in the twenty-first century. Contributing to the rate, and as effective as the national advertising campaigns, are the promotions by local bars catering to students. As noted during the Tampa drinking tour, college bars often run “cost-leader” specials on weekday nights. Bar managers know that if they can get students inside the door, they will sell them enough alcohol and food to make a profit off of them by closing time. Bars offer “All-You-Can-Drink-Specials” on the cheapest beer available, and limit the time frame, e.g., from 7 P.M. to 9 P.M. Similarly, “Two-for-One” specials often have limited time frames, as do, by definition, “Happy Hours.” But most customers stay in the bar long after the specials have passed; sometimes drinkers remain in place because they can no longer move—all of the specials invite rapid consumption of alcohol.
Another popular inducement is “Ladies Night.” Female customers receive deep discounts all night, with two main results: more males patronize bars on Ladies Night than on any other weekday evening, and females consume far more alcohol that night than during their other trips to the bar. “We’ve never lost a dime on account of a ‘Ladies Night,’” said a bar manager in Iowa City, Iowa, “The guys pack in here paying full price, and we also sell a ton of food at regular prices, plus we get a reputation as a ‘happening place,’ and everybody comes back on the weekend and pays full price then. I love the ladies and Ladies Nights.”
College newspapers are filled with ads for “Ladies Nights” and other special evenings at the local bars. “Lose Those Midweek Blues,” a college town nightclub recommended in a Big Ten student newspaper; “Get over the HUMP NITE,” and coast downhill to the weekend. The inducement was a “$1 cover charge and 10 cent Miller” beer. A bar in a SEC college town advised, “Ease your mind before FINAL EXAMS with our MIND ERASER drink specials.” The Center for Science in the Public Interest noted that for some student newspapers, ad money from local bars constitutes a significant part of their revenue.
This prompts the question: Why do college administrators, now decrying student drinking, permit massive local bar advertising in newspapers that their universities own and subsidize? Banning the ads by official fiat would create free speech problems; however, encouraging student newspapers not to run the ads and agreeing to supplement the lost revenue dollar-for-dollar is a feasible solution. (Universities cover athletic department deficits; it is hoped they could find the money for this more worthy cause.)
Every day, almost every daily paper in America declines to run some sort of ad, thus student newspapers rejecting advertising that so clearly promotes binge drinking will not abrogate their readers’ First Amendment rights. Yet university authorities never explore this option, leading some observers to question whether schools are serious about curtailing binge drinking, or mainly seek to move it off-campus.
An even more direct challenge by local bars—rarely answered by administrators—are the tons of advertising leaflets that bars distribute on campus. The fliers usually announce week-night specials, and they are handed out, stapled to bulletin boards and kiosks, taped to lampposts and sidewalks, replicated on sidewalks in chalk, plastered on other public spaces, and even placed in student mailboxes. Universities, including public ones, could ban this advertising from their campuses—they forbid other kinds of commercial material—but they have been slow to react to the blizzard of bar leaflets.
In recent years, the bars have added another campus publication to their advertising arsenal: the ubiquitous weekly ad sheets (often yellow in color) that trumpet special deals at local pizza houses, Chinese take-outs, tanning salons,
travel agencies, and, most prominently, bars. Distributed by the thousands on many campuses, the full-page bar ads contain such copy as: “Kilroy’s on Kirkwood. We Throw the Best Party in Town. Every Thursday enter contests and win prizes. Participants are [also] entered to win a trip to whatever bowl game our team plays in.” Again, universities could move the ad sheets and their distributors off their property, but they rarely do.
In the fall, the travel agency ads in the yellow sheets increase before Christmas, and then, early in the second semester, they begin to feature many pages with Spring Break promotions. The Spring Break phenomenon—originally a cheap, one-week student trip to Fort Lauderdale, Florida—has become an elaborate and expensive multiweek sojourn involving various locales. Spring Break originated in the collegiate subculture of pre- and post-WWII America, but, in the final decades of the twentieth century, it escalated in both drunken revelry and corporate involvement. In many ways, Spring Break is the apotheosis of the collegiate subculture and any discussion about beer-and-circus must consider it.
Spring Break 1995 looks something
like an endless commercial break.
Corporate sponsors will spend a record $20 million trying to reach students on break from college during March. That’s nearly five times what was spent a decade ago.
Among 1995’s biggest spenders: Chevrolet’s Geo division and Coca-Cola. Each is expected to spend more than $2 million to get their message to the estimated 1 million students who are piling in to one of four spring break hot spots: Panama City and Daytona Beach, Fla; Lake Havasu City, Ariz; and South Padre Island, Texas.
—USA Today
Ironically, the corporations that spent the most on Spring Break promotions in the 1980s—the beer companies—pulled out of direct sponsorship in the 1990s (although they now do many “co-op” deals with bars and distributors in the Spring Break areas). Into the void came other national corporations, and, since the mid 1990s, many other businesses have joined them, particularly junk-food companies and banks hawking credit cards to undergraduates. In addition to “imprinting” their logos on college students and building brand loyalty, corporate America loves the “product placement” that Spring Break provides: with the festivities covered extensively by MTV and other cable networks, viewers watch as the cameras pan across beaches full of young bodies, with corporate logos always in the background. In 2000, corporations put an estimated $50 million into Spring Break advertising and promotions, and at least 1.25 million students, spending over $1 billion, participated in the festivities at American and off-shore locations.
This large industry owes its origins, as well as its current beer-and-circus connections, to college sports. In the mid 1930s, a number of intercollegiate swimming coaches at Northeastern colleges took their teams to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to train during their schools’ spring vacation period. In 1935, they added a swim meet to the training, and the event became popular, attracting more teams as well as some student supporters. The latter also partied on the beach. World War II ended the swim meets and the trips to Florida, but, after the war, Fort Lauderdale began to attract college students on Spring Break. In the 1950s, major partying involving thousands of undergraduates occurred in that town. A popular 1958 novel, Where the Boys Are, described the scene, Hollywood filmed a version of the book, and Spring Break developed into a collegiate tradition, eventually becoming as deeply embedded in the subculture as hazing and the huge Greek letters on the front of chapter houses.
By the 1980s, the residents of Fort Lauderdale, now a part of the Miami metro area, had tired of weeks of drunken kids on their beaches, and, with strict police enforcement of municipal ordinances, the city removed itself from the Spring Break destination list. Daytona Beach, a few hundred miles north and that much closer to Northeastern, Atlantic Coast, and Midwestern schools, became the 1980s student vacation spot; subsequently, Panama City in the Florida Panhandle, with the help of MTV, emerged as an attractive locale, as did South Padre Island, Texas. Meanwhile, college students in far western states who had gone to Palm Springs, California, for many years began to migrate to the more hospitable Lake Havisu, Arizona, area.
In the 1990s, corporate travel agencies moved into the Spring Break business and began offering package tours to U.S. and off-shore spots, mainly in Mexico. That country, with a legal drinking age of eighteen and reasonably priced hotels, proved very attractive to American collegians, with the beach resorts of Cancun and Mazatlan becoming the most popular Mexican destinations. Rolling Stone, in its 1999 guide to Spring Break, noted in the category “Chances of getting served using a fake ID,” that in Cancun, the chances were “very high. A note from Mom will pass,” and bars in Mazatlan were almost as casual. Other off-shore locations, particularly in the Caribbean, also became popular, as did Spring Break cruises.
The travel agencies made handsome profits from their Spring Break “packages”—many off-shore ones began at $1,000 per person (door to door) and with decent accommodations approached $2,000. But in case a collegian did not want the sun-and-surf, the agencies and some airlines offered ski packages—Steamboat Springs, Colorado, becoming the South Padre Island of the student ski crowd.
In some ways, Spring Break resurrects the traditional walls between the collegiate subculture and other student groups. Hard-core vocational students lack the extra income for even the least expensive vacations; a senior woman at Ohio State remarked, “I always go home for Spring Break because I don’t have the money to go anywhere else. Anyway, I have to work full-time for my dad that week. My close friends don’t go anywhere either, and usually work that week.” On the other hand, semivocationals who work part-time at college often use some of their job money for a Spring Break trip.
However, highly vocational students on athletic scholarships—the undergraduates who helped start Spring Break—often have to work full-time during this period. In many sports—basketball, hockey, etc.—players are in NCAA tournaments; in spring sports like baseball and outdoor track, athletes begin intensive training periods; and even Division I-A football players have to prepare for their April weeks of “Spring Practice.”
Finally, rebel students and academically inclined ones often have their own versions of Spring Break. In the early 1990s, a Big Ten newspaper ran an article about “Students [Who] Spend Break in Search of the Dead,” i.e., join the Grateful Dead tour. Today, many rebels spend the week following other bands and/or making the rebel scene in various cities.
Similarly, some academic undergraduates take trips of special interest to them. An Iowa State senior female revealed:
For the last three years, I’ve spent Spring Break staying with a close friend who goes to the University of Chicago. I sleep in her room in the dorms, work on my term papers in the wonderful library there, and go to concerts and lectures on campus. It’s the most stimulating week of the year for me, and I hate to come back to Iowa State just as much as the sorority women hate coming back from the beaches.
Other academic students spend Spring Break in such activities as working for Habitat for Humanity, quietly engaging in charity work while the Greeks who trumpet their philanthropy party in the vacation spots.
During the school year on individual campuses, members of the different subcultures sometimes party together, but Spring Break, attracting hordes of Greeks and similar collegians, tends to alienate undergraduates who belong mainly to the vocational, rebel, or academic subcultures. “I can handle a party full of frat rats every so often here,” a University of Maryland honors student remarked, “but a beach full of thousands of them for an entire week would be way too much.”
For the collegiate subculture, Spring Break has become a major event on the calendar, more important than Homecoming Weekend, but less significant than a bowl game trip or a journey to the NCAA Final Four. However, unlike bowl games and NCAA tourneys, every collegiate student can participate in Spring Break and almost every one does at least once in her or his university career, generally more than
once.
Planning the Spring Break trip usually begins at the start of the second semester. Student newspapers run special Spring Break supplements at this time, and they include inserts from travel agencies as well as from Chambers of Commerce in Spring Break locales. In recent years, the Convention & Visitors Bureau of South Padre Island has distributed over 10 million copies of its brochures to college campuses around the country, its photos featuring handsome young collegians in skimpy swimsuits frolicking on beaches and giving the party salute.
After planning the trip, preparing for it consumes many weeks, if not months. Student newspapers run articles entitled, “Start Working Out Now [January 15] for Pleasing Spring Break Body,” and “Tanning Salons Work Overtime” (apparently, it is best to go on Spring Break with a tan in case it rains at the beach and a tan is unobtainable).
The actual trip can be anticlimactic—although most students will not admit that. A Florida bartender who has worked at Spring Break locales in the state for many years described spring breakers as much “crazier” than other tourists: “The whole concept of Spring Break is that kids come away on vacation and they want to drink and have sex.” They have no problem getting totally drunk and staying that way for days, but often a sexual hookup never occurs, and that leads to anticlimax or, more specifically, nonclimax.
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