Bartending is one of the purest and most honest crafts in hospitality. Anyone who’s stood behind the stick for years knows it’s not about memorizing recipes. It’s about rhythm. The best bartenders move on autopilot, shifting gears like a race car driver in stick shift. Once the mechanics are second nature, the real race begins: managing the room, reading the crowd, keeping the flow alive. And every veteran knows one truth: volume wins. Speed, grace under pressure, and presence of mind make the money — not whether you can recite the specs for a Sidecar.
Which is why bartending school, the private institutions that provide training to aspiring bartenders, is a sad simulation of one of the industry’s most hard-working gigs, and, quite honestly, a total racket.
Here’s the truth nobody wants to print: if you see bartending school on a strip-mall sign, odds are you’re staring at one of America’s longest-running scams. Millions have already learned it the hard way, walking out with a piece of paper worth less than the card stock it’s printed on.
This is something that’s known across the industry, but rarely spoken about, leaving unwitting undergrads and lower ranking industry members to spend hundreds of dollars on a certificate that will get them a whole lot of nothing. So how did bartending school become one of the greatest cons in hospitality?
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