I had only worked at a concession stand only once in my life. During my senior year in high school, officials decided to do away with hiring high school students to work the concession stands at the Bulldog Bowl during Friday night football games. I knew the girls who did that. They were upset that they lost a temporary source of income. The officials instead decided that the school clubs would have to earn their funding by working the concession stands. This was a bad idea. This meant that the stands had a different staff every week that was learning to do the job. If a major problem arose, no one knew how to deal with it because they weren't there on a regular basis. There were two concession stands. One on the home side, the other on the visitors' side. You were lucky if you were working the visitors' side. There was never a line and everyone was quickly taken care of. When I worked for the Drama Club, I started at the visitors' side. Then they made me go to the home side. EVERYTHING WAS CHAOS THERE!
That was just a hint of what I would encounter at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre in the Denver area. But there was a new element: alcohol. I had no experience dealing with thousands of people who had been drinking nor people who got belligerent when they were drunk.
One of the things I didn't like about Fiddler's Green was that every cashier station sold beer and wine. In the main concession stands, every line had their own beer and wine taps for faster service. I would have preferred they have "Alcohol Only" kiosks manned by our burlier employees. But it's obvious that being able to get beer and wine anywhere you go increases the amount that can be sold and would beat having to make our customers go through two different lines.
Another problem with alcohol sales was that everyone who cashiered was required to get alcohol server permits from Arapahoe County. The funny thing was that you could get a servers permit when you were 18, but you couldn't legally drink alcohol until you were 21 in Colorado. We also had an issue with the fact that we were not permitted to provide lids and straws for our drinks. So a lot of people who bought two beers had to walk VERY carefully back to their seats. I know a lot of people spilled their beers and sodas all over the place.
The worst aspect of all this was that there were times when we couldn't serve everyone. One of the regulations regarding sales of alcohol was that once the main act started performing after intermission, we were forced to stop selling alcohol. Everybody who was still in line when the taps were removed were out of luck. My first Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon working there had two sold out shows by a well-known performer whose fans are referred to as "parrotheads." (And mind you, there were very few people who were capable of selling 36,000 tickets in Denver.) ALL these people were beer drinkers. When we shut down alcohol sales, there were still THOUSANDS in line. I thought a riot was about to break out. The stupid thing was that everybody was getting mad at us because they thought we didn't want to sell them beer. No matter how much we explained that the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department was making us cut off the booze, they wanted to blame us. People started yelling things like, "Fiddler's Green sucks! Red Rocks is better!" It felt like the Bulldog Bowl concession stand all over again.
And that brings us to another point. Red Rocks is a legendary venue. The top recording artists LOVE playing there and it was very audience friendly. The day of a concert, people can start arriving several hours early. They're able to bring their picnic lunches, drinks and as much booze as they can carry in one trip. At Fidder's Green, if someone tried to bring in outside food and drinks, it was swiftly confiscated by security. Some people assumed that security ate the food. Nope, it was thrown away.
And our food was real cruddy. We had pretzels, pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, ham sandwiches and french fries sold at excessive prices. They all started out frozen and we baked them in the ovens. Most of the time, we would be in such a rush to get more pretzels in the oven, so we would just pull the other stuff out pre-marturely and hope it continued cooking under the heat lamps before somebody ate them. (As it was, the pretzels were our #1-selling food item. At $1.50 each, they were the cheapest thing on the menu. We never wanted to run out of those.) We also had popcorn, that had been made hours before we opened. We also had nachos. I loved the taste of nacho cheese on the pretzels, but I hated having to clean the vat.
The next to last show that first season was a big beer crowd. However, it was a mature beer crowd. I managed the hot dog kiosk. We always had the regular condiments: ketchup, mustard and relish. For this one show, those in charge brought over this gigantic jar of Grey Poupon. They said it was because we had an "upscale" crowd that night. I looked at that jar and KNEW that someone was just going to come up and take it. Upscale crowd or not, that concert was the only time the whole season that we SOLD OUT of beer. Nothing was coming out of the tap, we sold all the bottled beer in the fridge and we weren't going to be getting any more kegs because intermission was almost over. We had a whole crowd of people who suddenly left our kiosk and ran to the next one about 20 yards away, but I'm pretty certain they were sold out of beer, too. After they left, I looked at the condiment counter. I saw the Grey Poupon jar. It had been scraped completely clean, BUT IT WAS STILL THERE! I had underestimated the integrity of this crowd.
I was doing my final closing that night. We had finished cleaning up and I had sent the employees to clock out. I had lowered the flaps on the kiosk and started doing the paperwork. A couple of guys from supplies had come by to get the empty kegs. All of a sudden, this man walked in under the flaps and said, "Hey, man! Sell me a beer." "I can't sell you a beer. We're closed." "Well, there was a big crowd earlier and I didn't want to wait. I need to get a beer!" "Even so, I don't even have any beer here. We sold out." He finally left. I was glad those supplies guys were there. I'm pretty certain he would have started throwing stuff around if he didn't get his beer and I was there all by myself.
A couple of years later, I was the Assistant Manager at the Mayan Theatre in Denver. The Manager once proudly announced that the powers that be were considering getting us a liquor license so that we could sell beer and wine in the upstairs concession stand. My first thought was, "No, I can't deal with that that. I'm traumatized." He saw it as a real moneymaker. (He would. He got a percentage of the concession sales.) However, he added, "But they're not going to be able to take the drinks into the auditorium, and we're going to have to post people by the doors to make sure they don't take them into the auditorium." I said, "Why are we bothering then?" I could just see all the fights breaking out and beer and wine getting spilled all over our carpets. I think someone figured out it was a bad idea and didn't follow up on it. But I knew what we would be in for.
The one thing I learned from all this is that I never would have been able to be a bartender. I'm glad I never tried.
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