How Bartending Got Hustled

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? 

Since the 1960s, a cottage industry has thrived on convincing wide-eyed kids (and their parents) that bartending is something you can buy in a classroom. They dangle certificates and job placement as if bartending were a trade like plumbing or accounting.

But it’s all smoke and mirrors. These programs often train with water instead of booze, drilling recipes out of binders. They charge hundreds of dollars a head, and in return, students leave thinking they’ve been handed keys to the industry. In reality, it’s like saying because you learned to drive a stick shift in a parking lot, you’re ready for the NASCAR circuit.

In the case of one journalist’s experience, a bartending school instructor’s “main piece of advice is, when you go out for an interview, don’t show your bartending school certificate. There’s a stigma among many bar managers and bartenders that people who go to bartending school lack the know-how to be a good worker, or that they aren’t willing to work their way up.”  

In actual hospitality — whether it’s a chain restaurant in Tulsa or a three-star bar in Manhattan — the phrase “I just graduated bartending school” is a punchline. Managers know it signals inexperience and bad habits. Nobody cares that you can make a Margarita. They care whether you can keep your head when twelve tickets hit the printer, whether you can set the pace for a room, whether you can make guests feel seen.

The cruelest irony? These schools promise job placement. But “job placement" usually translates to being sent Craigslist job openings or an interview for a catering position at a place the bar school owner's friend runs. That’s it. The idea that a certificate guarantees you a $40,000-$100,000 gig is fantasy.

The franchise bar school model is the kicker. Anyone can buy in. The same people who once enrolled, dazzled by the pitch, become franchisees themselves. Few have ever actually run a high-volume bar, never learned to move as part of a team, never bled through a Saturday double. But suddenly they’re gatekeepers, selling a fantasy to the next batch of hopefuls.

As young professionals in New York City, the hardest part wasn’t the grind, it was figuring out who the hell was real. Everyone claimed to be an expert, everyone wanted to sell you something, and 95 percent of it was fake. That’s the truth most beginners don’t want to hear.

We got lucky. We cut our teeth under the old guard — the ‘90s bartenders who were phasing out by the early 2000s. They were blunt, battle-worn, and allergic to bullshit, but they knew how to keep a bar breathing under pressure.

And then there was Sasha Petraske, God rest his soul. He wasn’t some face on TV. He was the face behind a movement that reshaped an entire country’s drinking culture. Petraske didn’t flex, he set an example, he taught others — how to run a bar, how to balance the craft against the brutal math of business. He understood speed. He understood volume. And he understood the guest. He taught us how to make cocktails, but more than that, he showed us that real bartending isn’t just craft or commerce, it’s both.

And here’s the thing — real education in this business doesn’t come from laminated certificates or plastic bottles in a shopping center. The majority of “bartending schools” are selling theater, not craft. They hand out hope like a flyer, and hope doesn’t get you through a Saturday double.

The real voices don’t need gimmicks. They’ve bled for their credibility. We endorse people like Dale DeGroff and Steve Olson and the academy they’ve built — not because of hype, but because they’ve survived the fire, innovated in it, and know how to bend the rules without breaking the bones of hospitality. Those are the programs worth paying for, because they come from lived scars, not PowerPoint slides.

If you’re trying to figure out who’s legit, the test is simple: look at the receipts. Who did they train? What bars did they build? How many nights did they survive when the whole place was under water? If they can’t answer that, you’ve got your answer.

Here’s the truth: 95 percent of bartending schools are scams — cheap tricks packaged as careers. If it’s an academy built by someone who’s earned their scars, it’ll cost more, but you’re paying for blood and wisdom, not binders and plastic bottles. Because in this business, the only certificate that matters is whether you can hold the line when the bar’s on fire. 

Traditionally — and still today — the path into bartending runs through barbacking and cocktail serving. That’s where the fundamentals are learned:

The truth is, the best way to learn bartending is through barbacking. Not just because you pick up recipes or polish glassware, but because you learn the flow of the bar. A good barback manages everything except the guests, which means they’re really managing the bartenders. Lose one bartender, and the others cover. Lose the barback, and the whole bar is in trouble.

That’s why the strongest bartenders almost always start as barbacks. Cocktail servers learn the same way — by being close to the fire, learning the rhythm of drinks and service before stepping behind the stick themselves. 

Most of these schools are licensed by the state, but not accredited. The difference matters. They are, in most states, licensed by the state, but they’re treated as trade schools — like plumbing or HVAC programs. But bartending isn’t a trade in that sense. 

Local and state governments don’t have the knowledge or the bandwidth to qualify bartending within hospitality, so a lot gets rubber-stamped without scrutiny. On paper, that license gives them legitimacy. In reality, it’s a loophole. 

There are hundreds of bartending schools in the United States. There is one association with over 60 schools that alone boasts that 10,000 new bartenders are trained every year through their schools and their affiliates. Another popular school claims to have trained over 500,000 students since the ‘70s, which is around 10,000 per year. With an average tuition running between $300 and $500 per course, the amount of money spent in these schools is easily above $10,000,000 a year, but the real totals could far exceed that because most of these places don’t report their numbers.

To us, most are scams. But because the fee is “only” a few hundred bucks, people let it slide. There have been a few lawsuits, but only a few that were substantial. The scam keeps rolling because real operators — those running actual restaurants, hotels, and bars — don’t have the time to worry about what a sideshow hustle does to rip off kids.

Many — though not all — bars, restaurants, and hotels sit empty during the day, or potentially have space somewhere in the venue that isn’t being used until the evening. That downtime isn’t dead space — it's an untapped opportunity. Ownership groups could turn those venues into living academies, teaching real bartending in a real bar, generating revenue at the same time. Instead of chasing the ghost kitchen craze (unless you’ve already got one that works) why not build something that feeds your brand directly? Structured daytime programs where students learn on the line, with the actual tools and the actual pace. Not plastic bottles in a strip mall, but real bars, real kitchens, real pressure. Tuition covers the cost. Waivers and attorneys cover the liability. The result? A new revenue stream and a pipeline of talent already trained in your systems.

Picture a restaurant or bar flipping its downtime into an academy: students learning the ropes, learning to barback, learning flow, getting coached on footwork, rhythm, mechanics, and guest interaction. In 10 days, they’d learn more than a year in a fake school.

This is the real win: money stays in the industry, owners diversify their revenue streams, and the next generation learns the craft the way it’s meant to be taught — shift by shift, side by side, in the fire. And it’s self-serving in the best way possible: your top graduates become your next hires, groomed in your style of service. Real training from operators with proven methods and track records will help them land real jobs — keeping talent in the industry instead of feeding the scam.

Ask any bartender who has worked professionally for at least five minutes, most shake their head and sigh, some will curse. The kid who shows up with a certificate? Yeah, it’s a joke. But don’t forget — you were once that kid too. Raw. Hungry. Clueless. Personality still counts. Attitude still counts. Give them a shot if they’ve got the heart to grind. What this industry doesn’t need is more strip-mall “academies” selling laminated dreams. What it does need is real schools built by real bartenders, long-in-the-tooth vets, and so-called dinosaurs stepping up to train the next wave. We beg the pros — those who’ve lived it, bled it, and carried this industry on their backs — to build these schools, to pass on the craft, not the con. Because the truth is simple: the only degree worth a damn in this business is the one you earn when the tickets won’t stop printing and the bar is on fire — and you hold the line anyway.