High Spirits

Bingo! If you were to venture inside a nightclub or bar catering to twentysomethings these days, you might be surprised to witness not drunken debauchery but a spirited round of-how wholesome can you get?-bingo.

"It's unlike any other gambling game," says Roger Snowden of the Vashom, Washington-based Bingo Bugle Newspaper Group, speaking of bingo's appeal. "The social aspects of bingo are what lead people to play it. The camaraderie [is key]."

And camaraderie, without question, is a goal of savvy bar owners attempting to lure in a contemporary crowd with too many entertainment options and too little appetite for the hard-drinking days of old.

"There's just so much competing for the customers' attention now," says Rick Hynum, editor of Nightclub & Bar magazine, citing video games, home satellite dishes and cyberspace as distractions du jour. "There's not necessarily as much reason to go out. Plus, people aren't drinking as much as they used to."

Which explains why bingo is taking off in a select number of Generation X clubs. It also explains other crowd-pleasing promotions such as Brady Bunch lookalike nights, marshmallow stacking games, performances by KISS tribute bands and baby-food-eating contests.

Baby-food-eating contests? Well, nobody said entertainment was pretty.

This article was originally published in the July 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: High Spirits.