This Would Be $15 in a Bar.
Statistically, more people are drinking at home than ever — but why?
If you’re even remotely familiar with me as a person, you know that cocktails at home are kind of my whole, entire deal. For me, imbibing at home was always supposed to start and end with Best Shot Co., as a small business — and social life raft — to get me through the COVID-19 lockdowns. I never expected to be sitting down five years later, still hosting 90% of my happy hours in my living room instead of at a bar. It’s pretty rare these days that I pay for a cocktail out, at least not without some pretty extensive research into the bar or a recommendation from someone I really trust.
That’s not to say I’ve completely stopped going out or that I want bars to fail. There’s nothing I like more than sitting at Folk’s Folly with Valerie in front of a frosty vesper (with blue cheese olives, IYKYK) before digging into a bottle of Zinfandel and a loaded baked potato. Tropical bars will always get me because I love a flash-blended drink, but I’ll never buy a stand-up mixer for home. I still have many, many friends who work in bars, and I would very much like to see their careers persist successfully for years to come.
A neighborhood watering hole is, and always has been, a centralized hub for community — and alcohol has long been on the menu. Beer was brewed for public consumption in Mesopotamia as early as the Neolithic period (10,000 - 4,500 BC). Plutarch described the advantages of drinking in moderation purely for social connection in his Symposium of the Seven Wise Men1. A study by the University of Oxford in 2017 showed that “people who have a ‘local’ that they visit regularly tend to feel more socially engaged and contented, and are more likely to trust other members of their community.”
Whether you are grabbing a drink or sitting down for dinner, local places are undoubtedly important for both the economy and the community. That said, I’m not the only one who has traded their Friday night reservation for martinis in my kitchen. Five years after lockdown, consumers are still moving from bar stools to the couch in record numbers. Research from Drinkaware shows that 45% of adults say they now spend more on alcohol for home consumption than in pubs and restaurants, with that number up from 38% in 2023.
But why? Why are people staying home instead of meeting up for happy hour? It would be easy to argue that it comes down to economics; it’s a lot cheaper to make cocktails at home than it is to have them out. But that has always been the case. Inflation might be hitting hard in 2025, but it doesn’t explain the ever-growing shift towards home bars.
Since 2000, the quality of cocktails — and the bars that serve them — has done nothing but surge upwards. With bars like Milk & Honey and Death & Co., there came a norm of meticulously crafted drinks, especially for Millennials who were coming of age at a time when the intersection of affordability and execution was reaching its zenith. Even if you didn’t live in a major food city like New York or New Orleans, well-made classics and compelling original recipes had become regular fare for a Saturday night rush.
Then came 2020. Bars shut down, guests stayed home, and worrying about the right amount of vermouth in a martini became, frankly, an issue too small to spend time on. There were bigger fish to fry — especially when 1 in 6 restaurants were closing and there was a reported 16% drop in the industry workforce.
Guests were also dealing with their own social reckoning. It quickly became clear that people weren’t going to stop drinking just because bars weren’t open for service. Many of them looked to other sources, like online cocktail classes and e-commerce liquor sales, to replace the traditional bar experience.
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in the US, “online alcohol sales during March 2020 grew by 234% as compared to the same month in the preceding year. For example, Drizly, the largest alcohol e-commerce delivery marketplace in the US and Canada, and operating in 235 counties, reported a 400% increase in sales in May 2020, as compared to the same month in the preceding year (Drizly, 2020).”
On paper, the restaurant industry has bounced back from 2020. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported record-setting sales across the US industry at $981B output in 2023 — but that spike doesn’t seem to account for the beverage side of the industry, which shows wine and spirit sales, particularly on-premise, continuing to plummet in 2024 and 2025. This leaves us with the original question: why are more people than ever choosing to enjoy their drinks at home?
The BLS reported “the median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,194 in the first quarter of 2025”, coming to roughly $62,000 per year before taxes and other deductions. However, single adults need to earn nearly $81,000 per year to live comfortably in the nation’s most affordable state (West Virginia). Deloitte’s State of the US consumer: June 2025 report shows that while Americans’ discretionary spending intentions saw the first uptick in nine months, it still remains well below 2021 levels2. So, while some belts are loosening, a majority of consumers are remaining — whether by desire or necessity — pickier than ever about where their money is going, especially in non-essential categories.
It can’t be denied that it is expensive to go out these days. One cocktail can easily cost $15-$18, and it’s no longer unexpected to see lists with drinks that break $20. Factoring in the cost of Uber or public transit, a couple of rounds, and a plate of cheese fries, consumers can easily drop $100+ per person after tax and 20% tip on a casual night out.
But again, people have always known they could save money by drinking at home. It’s not a secret that you’re paying a 300% mark-up for your favorite Cabernet in a restaurant opposed to a liquor store, and we’ve already established that people will continue to imbibe regardless of obstacles. The decline in consumers willing to pay for a traditional bar experience doesn’t come from a disinterest in going out, but from a combination of ever-rising prices3, stagnant wages across the board, and ever-lowering standards for products coming out of a lot of cocktail bars.
The truth is that the quality of service seems to have gone down and never really returned to what it was pre-covid. It’s become difficult to even expect continuity of an experience at a single bar. Too often, I’ve found myself walking into even my favorite bars either breathing a sigh of relief that a particular bartender is working or resigning myself to a glass of wine when I see they aren’t.
Meticulous technique used to be the cornerstone of guest experience across the board, not just in ultra-famous high-level bars. Now, it often feels like that standard is regarded as too tedious for everyday service, insignificant in the grand scheme of long tickets filled with Aperol spritzes and dirty vodka martinis.
It would be easy to write this off as laziness on the part of bar staff, but I think this is a sign of a greater industry shift. Since the craft cocktail movement started, its decline has been imminent. Everything is cyclical, and just like the flashy, sugary drinks of the 70s and 80s came after the decades-long reign of tropical classics, so too will something new come after the cocktail renaissance of the 2000s and 2010s. Maybe that something is the rise of pre-made cocktails, either canned or on-tap. Maybe it’s a gravitation back to simpler, two-ingredient drinks. Maybe it’s a decline in drinking altogether.
Whatever the next big wave is, I do think there are always going to be people who will want to order daiquiri riffs and split-base manhattans. (I’ll absolutely be one of them.) But something is going to have to give in terms of how cocktail bars are approaching the quality of their product in relation to the actual value they’re delivering to guests. The days are gone when you could throw a half-baked infusion on a menu and the crowd would go wild. Instagram and TikTok are putting knowledge directly into consumers’ hands, creating a new baseline of understanding for the general public. It’s easier than ever for people to learn how to make great drinks at home — at a fraction of the cost.
A survey of 1500 people in the US, revealed that more than half of the interviewees reported having prepared themselves cocktails during the past months [in 2020] and 54% stated that they intended to keep this habit up. The same survey, from US retailer Grizly, reported an exponential growth of sales of liqueurs, cordials, schnapps, and mixers (of between 600% and 1000%) with sales of vermouth growing by 1200% (Captain, 2020). — Trends in alcohol consumption in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-country analysis
After two decades of experiencing a renaissance of craftsmanship, guests won’t pay the price of a fast-casual entree for a cocktail that was barely shaken and dumped in a glass. As prices on menus get higher, and the average guest’s paycheck stays the same, cocktail bars will have to differentiate themselves with more than just unconventional ingredients and a gaudy social media presence. Going into 2026, technical precision and a commitment to truly great guest experience will be what separates bars that struggle from those that are full.
Septem Sapientium Convivium by Plutarch as published in Vol. II of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1928 PDF version here.
Discretionary categories include leisure travel, restaurants, recreation and entertainment, electronics, clothing, personal care, household goods, education, child care, and home furnishing.
This isn’t an indictment of bars. Cost is an ever-revolving door that has to account for ingredients, waste, labor, taxes, and a slew of other expenses. Bar owners are not typically raising prices because they’re taking advantage of guests to make a profit. Prices go up for the same reason all small businesses have to raise their prices— because it’s necessary to stay open.
As always, these opinions are my own.