Will gender discrimination rules put an end to ladies' night at bars?

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was an Onion story, but it seems the state of Minnesota has declared last call for ladies' night.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights issued a statement declaring ladies'-night promotions -- wherein female customers are offered discounted or free drinks in exchange for gracing a bar with their presence -- unfairly discriminate by gender and are in violation of the state's human rights act.

Five bars in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are being investigated for hosting ladies' nights. (The detective work may have consisted of, I don't know, going into bars that have advertisements for them.) The department says it won't seek out violators in the future but will respond to specific complaints, like if a guy decides he doesn't like paying full price for a cosmo and calls his lawyer.

Robert P. Murphy, writing in the area's major daily paper, the Star Tribune, disagrees with the decision on the grounds that a ladies' night is a type of targeted discrimination that happens commonly and profitably.

On Ladies' Night, Minnesota bars are engaging in what economists call price discrimination, the practice of charging different people different prices for the same good or service. To some, this might seem scandalous, but it happens all the time. Grocery stores will sell the same product at two different prices -- a regular price and a sale price for someone who has registered with the store or clipped a coupon.

Since grocery store customers can choose whether or not to use a coupon more easily than bar patrons can choose to be the gender on the receiving end of a discount, that particular argument isn't convincing. But the writer's point about the common practice of price discrimination, its benefit to businesses and customers and the shaky line drawn by the ladies' night ban, is more persuasive.

Businesses discriminate against patrons all the time for things they can't help. When you pay more to have a blouse dry-cleaned than a man's shirt, you are discriminated against for having the buttons on the wrong side.

When you pay full price for a movie, you are being discriminated against for failing to hang on to a student ID years after graduating or flunking, as the case may be. Whenever you don't receive a senior-citizens' discount at Burger King, you are discriminated against for not reaching old age despite a diet that includes Burger King.

The writer goes on:

By outlawing the practice, the government would clearly hurt the businesses involved, and all of their female customers. But even male customers might be worse off, if their favorite locales had to scale back operations -- for instance, by having fewer live bands or fewer workers on each shift. In fact, in the case of Ladies' Night, the harm to men is even more pronounced.

For one thing, it will often be men who end up paying the higher cover and drink prices for the women entering the bar. And of course, the more basic point is that the whole rationale of Ladies' Night is to fill a bar with women, which makes the location a place men want to visit. Most men who frequent bars would hardly feel vindicated by "fair" pricing if it chased away half the women who otherwise would have gone out that night.

As a drinker, I have thought about this and decided I don't care, since I don't live in Minnesota and tend to avoid bars that can't attract women on their own merits, but there is economic logic to what the writer is saying.

Anyway, is a loosely enforced ban on ladies' nights a minor legal curiosity or a serious infringement on the rights of businesses? I wonder what the blogosphere thinks.

On a site called the Intellectual Conservative, Gary Larson (probably not the guy who created The Far Side, sadly) writes:

Faceless bureaucrats' intrusion into private lives of guys dating gals, of women stopping by a friendly bar for a cocktail, to say nothing of encroachment on bar owners trying to boost sales and spread a little good will, is strictly out of the Theater of the Absurd...

Ladies' night is an institution that draws patrons, spurs bar sales. Guys buy low-priced drinks for their dates and other lady friends, and pay full price themselves. Single women come in after work for a cool one, and who knows whom they'll meet? Of course all of this puts plus dollars in the cash register.

Setting aside the amusingly old-fashioned tone there, are you telling me that if a guy buys a drink at ladies' night and says it's for a woman, he only pays half price? What have I been doing all these years?

Anyway, it turns out there's a long history of litigation on the subject. None of the cases have really brought an end to America as we know it, but then again, they have generally predated the Internet, Glenn Beck's chalkboard, etc.

The same things is happening right now in Florida and has occurred in several other states.

As outrages go, ladies' nights aren't exactly Plessy v. Ferguson, nor is their hypothetical ban any great victory for equality. If bar owners feel stung, they could do something truly progressive and start a real conversation -- charge women 77 percent of what they charge men, since that's what women are still paid on average.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/07/is_this_the_end_of_ladies_nigh.html