Protecting Yourself

As an owner, you know you could be held liable if one of your customers causes injury after they leave your place. You take steps to protect yourself by educating your staff and teaching them how to recognize when a customer has had too much to drink. Your staff encourages those customers to take a cab or have a friend take them home. And, you’re probably paying for liability insurance in the event these precautions aren’t enough.

Additional Protection

DrinkSmart, LLC offers you an additional way to inoculate yourself from the Dram Shop Laws. We can provide a $4,000 self-administered coin operated breath analyzer (Alcohol Alert), free of charge to you. Alcohol Alert meets the same level of accuracy and consistency law enforcement agencies require for their equipment. The presence of the Alcohol Alert machine, along with encouragement by staff and posted signs for its use, enables the customer to take responsibility for the effects their drinking has on them.

What Your Customers Want

The number one excuse law enforcement officers get when they pull drivers over and they test over the limit is, “I didn’t know I was that high.” Most people don’t want to drive impaired, but when they do it’s usually out of ignorance.” Many people, if they’ve been drinking, would like to have a way to test themselves to determine if they’re safe to drive.

Self-Testing for Your Customers

Alcohol Alert is state-of-the-art technology for self-monitoring and is easy to use. The customer just blows through a straw into the machine, and the result is a numerical readout of current blood alcohol content (BAC), and a verbal warning if it indicates potential impairment. Nobody says they want to drive impaired, but most people can’t tell on their own when they’ve had too much. Alcohol Alert doesn’t tell a person whether they can drink or not, it tells them when, for sure, they shouldn’t drive. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Liability Issues

Both your customers and you can be liable for what happens after they leave. Nothing can add to that liability, but you can take additional steps to reduce that liability by making an Alcohol Alert machine available for them.

Alcohol Alert helps protect you because it’s a self-administered test, and a screening device. The machine never says it’s OK to drive; it just indicates BAC levels and warns against driving as the levels increase toward the legal limit of .08%.

The results of the self-test can not be used in court because admissible tests must be administered by a trained expert. In addition, there must be a printout of the test results, and the test must be conducted on a state certified machine.

Your staff can use the Alcohol Alert as the reason to stop serving customer when necessary. Free tokens for staff are available to be used for this purpose. Obviously if a staff member witnesses a customer testing over the limit, they should encourage the customer not to drive while impaired. Taking this kind of action demonstrates the establishment has a policy that protects both the customer and the bar.