No More Free Champagne for Limousine Customers : State Rule May Make for Back-Seat Speak-Easies
An elegant couple slinks into the lush interior of their waiting limousine. She’s in a silver gown and carries a jeweled handbag. He wears bespoke-cut evening clothes and carries . . . a bottle of champagne in a brown paper sack.
As of the end of this month, those will be the rules.
A recent state attorney general’s opinion has found that any business that provides a product or service--whether a ride in a limo or a night in a bed-and-breakfast mansion--cannot legally throw in a cocktail, gratis.
And so the limo mystique--the glass of champagne behind smoked windows, the back-seat bridal toast, the quick Scotch to calm the nerves on the way to the Academy Awards--is against the law . . . unless you bring your own bottle.
According to the legal opinion, a customer, by paying for a service, implicitly pays for the “complimentary” alcohol provided by a business that has no license to dispense it, even indirectly. Quoting language in an 1879 Massachusetts case, the opinion said, “It is wholly immaterial that no specific price is attached to those articles separately.”
Assistant Atty. Gen. Jack Winkler said the opinion, requested by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, found that any firm providing free drinks to customers already paying for a product or service has technically broken the law by selling a beverage.
Have Two Options
All that is news to limousine operators, who trade on their fleets’ $40-an-hour image of glamour and high life. They say that two of their options are to flout the law and fight the opinion through the courts, which some indicate they will, or to suggest to their clients that they brown-bag their own refreshment, be it Dom Perignon, Gallo, or a six-pack of beer.
Thomas Economus, who owns Seventh Heaven limousine service in Hollywood, which does a brisk celebrity business, laments:
“Can you see me telling Burt Reynolds, ‘Yeah, Burt, and bring a bottle of vodka or whatever you’re drinking’? It ruins the whole illusion. We’re a novelty business and this takes a lot of the novelty out.”
Economus, who left his family’s Chicago restaurant to start his business, says the issue is not alcohol, it’s ambiance.
Half of his customers are corporate accounts, celebrities and the like. The other half are “regular guys” who save their money for a special event--a birthday surprise, an anniversary--and they want the limo star treatment for their hard-earned money.
Economus’ general manager, Stephen Russo, says, “A lot of people hire limos for a special anniversary, and they like to have champagne waiting in the back. What are you going to do, give them apple cider?”
Attila Fenyes, president of the Assn. of California Limousine Operators, in Reseda, agrees. “People don’t rent limousines for liquor, just like people don’t fly first class so they can drink all they want. They rent them basically for fancy transportation. Liquor is just an additional amenity.”
Operators such as Economus--who has invested $3,000 each in bars for his new limousines, with automatic buttons to dispense five different liquors and water--says they have been informing clients of the new regulation, and a few customers who had planned to toast the New Year from the back seat of a stretch Lincoln, are canceling their reservations.
Economus is having his attorney draw up a waiver for clients to sign, swearing that whatever alcohol they drink they’ve brought themselves, but that puts a damper on a romantic evening, like a prenuptial agreement on an elopement.
Fenyes worries: “Who’s to prove who provided the liquor? They’re going to be on a honeymoon and we’ll be in court.”
Fenyes fears that the regulation “will put more drunks on the road. For a lot of festive activities, champagne in the limo just adds a little extra. A lot of people, if they can’t have that, they say, ‘To hell with it.’ And then they go out and get drunk and get in an accident.”
John Thompson, assistant director of Alcoholic Beverage Control agency’s southern division, said that although the ruling should take effect around the end of the month, “We certainly won’t be pulling limousines over” to check for illicit Mai Tais.
“Generally what we’re going to do is treat that like any other kind of complaint--respond and investigate in a routine manner,” through a city attorney or district attorney.
