Up the street from the New York Stock Exchange, every seat at the Trinity Place bar is full. Customers wearing suits and toting briefcases are jammed shoulder to shoulder, shouting conversation over Dua Lipa songs.
The bustle has the feel of a Friday night — but it’s only Tuesday.
A rise in remote work has made the ritual of the Friday happy hour a tough sell in financial districts from New York to London, forcing bars and restaurants to rethink their strategies for courting the cubicle crowd. The fizzle of Fridays has owners and managers doing everything from hiring midweek DJs to changing their drink specials to staffing up behind the bar for shifts that are earlier in the week.
“The average consumer has become more of a homebody since the pandemic,” said Charles Lindsey, associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management. “They tend to get home earlier and also stay home more on the weekends. And so I think bars are adjusting their behavior accordingly.”
Office occupancy rates in New York City grazed 50% in June for the first time since the pandemic, giving bars a greater chance of luring commuters in for a drink. Data from Kastle Systems has shown that in the new era of hybrid work, Tuesday through Thursday are the busiest days for badging in at the office.
And so it makes sense for restaurants to “fish where the fish are,” said Lindsey, by offering cheap drinks at the times when workers are in the neighborhood in the greatest numbers.
Happy hour is new to Trinity Place, which added the 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. weekday special in 2022. Now, Wall Street workers regularly book out the bar for team happy hours, especially from Tuesday through Thursday.
“At five, it’s like a nightclub,” said Marcella Alday, Trinity Place’s general manager.
The after-work scene has changed so much that another Fi-Di outpost, Mezcali, brings in a DJ for the Tuesday through Thursday happy hour rush, said co-owner Alan Ngo. Same for nearby bar The Malt House, which now hosts a DJ on weekdays, blasting the likes of Usher and Akon.
Anthony Debique, the bar’s general manager, said it’s not unusual for Wall Street types to book out the entire second floor of the tavern, which hosts happy hours from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays — the same time workers at nearby banks like Wells Fargo & Co. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. power down for the day.
In London, pubs are defying a loosely enforced happy hour ban, introduced in 2010 to try to curb binge drinking, to draw out the midweek finance crowd. The Saint, situated just around the corner from the Bank of England, began offering two-for-one cocktails on Mondays and Tuesdays after undergoing a complete rebrand last year.
The decision was made to offset the increasingly “fickle” Friday crowd, according to assistant manager Spencer Deamer. On some weekdays, smartly dressed patrons now spill onto an outdoor square, and there’s a minimum of eight servers behind the bar from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.
“Within that time, they’ll just be continuously, nonstop serving customers,” said Deamer.
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A similar pattern has emerged at The Bar at Baccarat Hotel, a luxe outpost in Midtown that is blocks from the headquarters of finance giants like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp.
“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I feel like a lot of business is being done in person, and that’s when we see that sort of mingling and a lot of the business crowd coming in,” said Mark Tubridy, the bar manager at Baccarat. “If you can come for an after-work drink at 4:30 and be on the 6:00 train home, what’s to lose there?”
The promotions are a tactic for bars to recover from the moribund early days of the pandemic, when empty offices deprived them of foot traffic and sapped sales.
“It’s a way to drive incremental revenue in a period of the day that would normally be characterized by sunk costs,” said Christopher Gaulke, a lecturer at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration.
The bars still have plenty of hurdles to getting a packed house. A Markets Live Pulse survey conducted in May and June found that about a third of financial professionals are packing their lunch, eating office food or going straight home without grabbing after-work drinks more often than they used to pre-pandemic.
One Trinity Place regular said the bar he’s been frequenting since 2004 now has a different kind of appeal heading into the weekend: He often comes in for dinner on Fridays, he said, to be alone.
--With assistance from Madeleine Parker.
Author: Mia Gindis and Marnie Muñoz
