Go Smoke Free!

Do you own a restaurant?  Maybe you found out about this site through a table card left by one of your customers?  If so, and if you're already smoke free, then thanks!  Obviously, your customers appreciate your concern for their health and comfort (not to mention your own and that of your employees), and will keep coming back.

If you're not smoke free yet but are considering it, we urge you to consider it seriously and then go smoke free!  You may be worried that going smoke free will hurt your business with smokers, but in other cities and states that have enacted smoking bans, no effect or even an increase in business has been observed.  It makes sense if you think about it.  It's much easier for a smoker to refrain from smoking for the brief time it takes to consume a meal than it is for a non-smoker to not breathe for the time it takes to consume a meal!  Also, there are many more non-smokers whose business you stand to gain than non-smokers you may lose. 

You may be tempted to try partial solutions, such as non-smoking sections or filters.  Unfortunately, those are non-solutions.  Unless your smoking section is in a sealed room separately ventilated to the outside, smoke will inevitably enter the "non-smoking" section.  Even brief exposure to tobacco smoke results harm, and many of the toxins in tobacco smoke are colorless and odorless, leading to a false sense of security if smoke is not apparent.  In any case, you and your employees will need to enter the smoking section, resulting in harm to yourselves.  Filters also simply don't work, much as the filter makers would like you to believe that they do.  Have you seen how much those things cost?  Are you really going to make that back in increased business from smokers?  If you're going to try an experiment, maybe you should first try going smoke free.  It doesn't cost anything, and it's certain to get you plenty of good will and maybe even some extra business.

For more information about the issue of smoking in restaurants, and the way the tobacco industry manipulates restaurant owners and hospitality associations into advocacy of self-defeating policies that mostly benefit the tobacco companies, we urge you to visit Tobacco Scam.  We also recommend the Wisconsin Initiative on Smoking and Health list of benefits of going smoke free.