Drinking Slows as Navy Stems Tide of Liquor

For the Navy customer sitting down these days for a drink at the Gator Gardens enlisted club, the waitress will be keeping a tab for something more than the final bill.

Under an experimental program at the Naval Amphibious Base here to cut down on public drunkenness and drunken driving, the waitress will have been trained to size up the sailor’s physical ability to absorb liquor at the time of the first drink and will then monitor the number of drinks he is ordering by the hour.

Should the customer approach an outside limit of capacity estimated by the hostess, he will be offered food and non-alcoholic drinks along with a gentle but firm warning that the club is not going to allow him to become legally intoxicated.

And for the sailor who manages to avoid the subtle eye-balling from club employees and shows signs of over consumption, management will try to make certain he does not leave the club and drive.

The program--known as server intervention--represents the most ambitious effort yet for the Navy to put into effect orders from the chief of naval operations two years ago for Navy commands worldwide to de-glamorize alcohol. Should a final evaluation sustain preliminary figures showing the percentage of drunken customers cut in half, all or part of the program could be adapted for widespread Navy use as well as for civilian bars and lounges where intoxication is a problem.

Already, the Navy has a voluntary designated-driver plan at all of its enlisted and officers clubs, where one person in a drinking group can agree to go without liquor--to be sober to take everyone home later--and in turn receive free non-alcoholic drinks and coupons for discounted food on subsequent club visits.

Some Navy clubs have given limited training to employees on how to spot inebriated patrons. One of three clubs at the Naval Air Station in Fallon, Nev., was converted into a non-alcoholic club last year, with the bar made over into an ice cream soda fountain and numerous games and video diversions added. Clubs worldwide want to change their image to one of a total recreational center rather than that of a watering hole.

“Hopefully, these programs will bring about a long-range attitudinal change” toward liquor among Navy personnel, said Capt. Mike Murray, commanding officer of the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado.

Murray gave the go-ahead to the manager of the Gator Gardens to participate in the latest experiment designed by the Prevention Research Center of Berkeley, one of nine federally-funded national alcohol research centers in the United States.

The Berkeley center specializes in alcohol-related problems, such as drunk driving and assaults while drunk, that are not necessarily due to chronic drinking.

“That’s why we wanted to try server intervention and see if there is any merit to the idea of trying to change the drinking environment,” said Robert F. Saltz, the PRC researcher who designed the Gator Gardens experiment.

“We focused on the Navy, because it is concerned with DUIs (driving under the influence) and because sailors are likely to be at risk, in that they usually have more than one drink.”

Saltz said that Gator Gardens is typical of Navy clubs, with perhaps as many as 800 people in attendance on a busy Friday or Saturday night with nightly alcohol sales of $3,000. Annual sales approach $500,000 in liquor and $250,000 in food. The club features a large ballroom with live entertainment Wednesday through Sunday, video music every night and bingo on Tuesday, as well as smaller television and game lounges, snack areas and outside patios fronting San Diego Bay.

The typical customer averages between 21 and 22 years of age, and the clientele is 80% male and 85% active military. The Naval Amphibious Base is home to several commands, including elite special warfare schools, with thousands of Navy and other armed forces personnel on assignment at any single time. (People under 25 both in the military and civilian worlds are disproportionately represented in drunk driving statistics.)

“The pilot program was an opportunity for us to take advantage of (PRC’s) expertise,” said John K. Rezek, the civilian manager of all amphibious base clubs, including the Gator Gardens. “We had nothing to lose and everything to gain by participating.”

In addition, the economic health of the club, due to the large population it can draw from, meant it could suffer a drop in alcohol consumption without going into debt.

“We’re solvent where clubs on other bases are perhaps not so solvent, so it’s more of an acceptable risk for us,” Murray said. “If booze sales fall, we don’t have to close. And we have a steady influx of people at the various schools and commands, so there’s a large turnover within a matter of months.”

Working in conjunction with club manager Rezek, PRC’s Saltz drew up a program both to alter management policies and operations, and to train the club’s 50 or so employees in how to carry out systematic intervention.

Among the operational changes: 60-ounce pitchers of beer were eliminated; a second snack bar was set up in the ballroom to encourage more eating; waitresses were given specific table assignments; closing time was moved back to an hour after the last drinks are served; and floor walkers who keep control of rowdiness were encouraged to exchange information with waitresses.

“We found pitchers were connected with a macho image,” Rezek said. “Four guys would sit down and order four pitchers, and that compounded our problem of determining how many drinks they were having.”

When the club cut out pitchers, it replaced the small plastic cups in which single glasses of beer were served with large, heavy glass mugs.

“They look like they hold a lot, but actually they don’t,” Rezek grinned.

The second snack bar was set up because many customers either did not want to go into a separate room to buy food or did not know they could bring it back into the ballroom. By setting up another counter in the ballroom, customers now can go for food instead of ordering another drink.

Rezek also increased entertainment offerings, and keeps bands and video shows running a half hour after the last drinks are served so that customers will tend to stay and not run out to their cars immediately after downing a last round. The club then remains open another half hour after entertainment ends.

The key point in the 18-hour training sessions for employees was identifying customers in danger of getting drunk before they show visible signs of inebriation.

Waitresses now are taught to size up all customers roughly by weight and height when they first sit down, and to assign mentally a number to them: e.g., a small person is a 4; a medium is a 5; a large person is a 6. Based on previous research on alcoholic consumption, that number becomes the basis for determining how many drinks a person can consume over a given period of time without becoming legally intoxicated. The waitress subtracts the number of drinks consumed by the number of hours spent drinking and compares it to the person’s assigned size number.

For example, if a person noted as a size 5 has six drinks in one hour, he has reached his limit. He can have seven drinks in two hours, or eight drinks in three hours.

“We found through our (600) interviews with customers that this rule-of-thumb method coordinated well with instances of those persons who are intoxicated,” Saltz said.

The employees were also shown ways of diplomatically preventing customers from having that last drink that would put them over their limit. They now find out from patrons when they first sit down how their day has been going, whether they took the bus or drove, whether they have a designated driver, and other information to be used as a guide for serving them.

“The waitress gets cues as to how a customer’s day has been going, to find out if he’s there for the band or whether he might (be a candidate to) get tanked up,” Rezek said.

If a customer orders a drink that puts him one from his estimated limit, the waitress will put him down as a “yellow,” and ask whether he has considered a non-alcoholic beverage or perhaps some food.

“She’ll tip him off, so to speak, that she has been watching how much has been consumed, and will make some small mention of concern that he should go slower and that the club is concerned about him,” Saltz said. “If he is ordering the drink that puts him at the limit, she will explain the policies forcefully, that he won’t be able to get another drink for at least an hour.

“The whole emphasis is to give the prevention message before you have to refuse them a drink. It’s easier to do that when you’re not cutting them off at the same time.” Should a customer become belligerent or refuse to cooperate, the club’s security will remove the person from the ballroom or lounge and try to cool him down in a private office or other isolated area. Under no circumstances will they let the person drive away.

Because of the extra work involved in running such a system, the club hired additional help. “That required more payroll dollars and impacts profits, but that has to be compared with our goal of deglamourizing alcohol,” said Lt. Cmdr. J.R. Cote, the amphibious base supply officer who oversees the clubs.

Saltz and his colleagues did interviews and made observations in the club before and after the program was put into effect. An estimated 30% of all customers were legally drunk (0.10 level of alcohol in the blood) before the program began compared to 18% after the program had been in effect awhile. That compared to 26% at a similar club at the North Island enlisted club where no special procedures were tried.

“After statistical analysis, we believe that the program itself can cut the number (of intoxicated customers) in half,” Saltz said.

Murray and Rezek are more cautious about claiming success, in part because they want to see results continue over a longer period of time.

“We have seen some habits change among drinkers,” Rezek said. “The rate of consumption and the level of intoxication is down.”

Murray said, “We are careful about touting the program too much because we still have a lot of guys coming out of the club drunk. We haven’t cut all excess drinking although we have made progress in the attempt to get less DUIs. I still have them though, four in the past week.

“If a guy wants to get drunk, he can still do it. But by cutting down the numbers, we have a better environment by not having a bunch of drunks hanging around.”

Saltz believes that the program--with proper modifications--could be used in civilian bars and clubs where the drinkers are relatively young and have been made aware of society’s changing attitudes toward excessive drinking.

“We were told before we started (the Gator Gardens program) that people simply get drunk in the Navy and that we weren’t going to be able to change anything,” Saltz said. “But society is now more concerned in general. I don’t think the program would have worked 20 years ago.”

Saltz would like the funding to try the program in several civilian bars and clubs in the San Francisco area. He acknowledged that managers of non-military bars have more pressure to show profits than military clubs. By spending money for management changes and additional employees, they cannot be put at a competitive disadvantage for social benefits with clubs not practicing server intervention.

“Perhaps we would have to give the guy who does do server intervention a break on insurance premiums or maybe mandate the program and create problems for those who don’t go along with it,” Saltz said.

He said that costs could be controlled, for example, by keeping track of the number of drinks that individuals have through new computerized cash registers that can record the number of drinks and specific time that each is served.

“Success is never 100%, but (good results) can come from well-skilled employees and a club management able to show that the program is not going to keep people from having fun.”