Oklahoma Smokers

Restaurant operators get to choose where to locate their establishment, what to call it, what to offer on their menu, when their restaurant is open and when it is closed and to which segment of society it caters. In other words, restaurant operators get to choose for themselves the nature of their business venture. Or at least they did. Oklahoma restaurant operators no longer have the option to choose to operate an establishment which caters exclusively to smokers. That option was eliminated by the smoking ban which took effect on March 1st, 2006. From that day forward anyone opening a restaurant in Oklahoma has only one option, non-smoking. That is not an option, it is simply a government mandate.

If one is willing to spend extra money to construct an environmentally isolated ’smoking room’ as an adjunct to their non-smoking establishment they are free to do so. That however does not equate to a choice. A choice would mean that each and every restaurant operator in Oklahoma had the ability to opt for non-smoking only, smoking only or a combination of smoking and non-smoking. In that way customers could choose for themselves which restaurants they wished to patronize on the basis of their preference for non-smoking or smoking.

The smoking ban while encouraging restaurant operators to opt for non-smoking only also provides a means to accommodate smokers, albeit an expensive means. This fact gives rise to the question “Why no choice for restaurants to be smoking only?”.

Obviously the ‘why’ is not to protect anyone’s health as non-smokers would logically patronize either non-smoking only restaurants or restaurants having environmentally isolated non-smoking and smoking sections. So clearly the ‘why’ is not a health issue. This leaves only one possible motive for prohibiting ‘all-smoking’ restaurants and that motive is purely economic.

To understand why this is the case one needs only consider numbers. According to statistics from the Centers For Disease Control approximately 20 percent of adult Oklahomans are smokers. Statistics supplied by the state of Oklahoma put the percentage of smokers at twenty-five percent. What neither statistic reveals is that the percentage of smokers is much greater in rural Oklahoma than it is in the metropolitan areas but the much greater number of Oklahomans living in metropolitan areas smoothes out the over-all state average.

For example, consider a mythical rural Oklahoma town of 10,000 households half of which have one or more smokers. Now assume there are a total of five ‘home cooking’ restaurants in that town. Each restaurant is competing for the business of 10,000 households. If four of the five restaurants are non-smoking only and one was smoking only the demographics of the situation shifts radically. Rather than five restaurants competing for the business of 10,000 households there are four competing for the business of 5,000 non-smoking households. The one restaurant that is all-smoking has by default no competition for 5,000 smoking households.

Certainly the non-smoking restaurants in the above example could opt to add a ’smoking room’ in order to compete with the all-smoking establishment. Reality is that the costs of doing so are beyond the means of most rural restaurant owners. They have no choice but non-smoking.
For those wondering about the extra costs for the mythical ‘all-smoking’ restaurant. There are none. No modification would be required to operate an all-smoking restaurant were such possible under the smoking ban. The “all-smoking” restaurant would be on an equal footing with the non-smoking restaurant.

But wait. Isn’t everyone supposed to be equal under the law?

So they say. But it appears that some are more equal than others. At least in the eyes of the Oklahoma Legislature and Governor.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 3rd, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Smokers Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.