Bar culture has changed dramatically in recent years. Since the age of cell phones and smartphones, people haven’t been so busy with each other – a common complaint among bartenders everywhere. To solve this puzzle, a bar decided to block cell service and virtually force customers to talk to each other.
Do you think that sounds crazy? It is kind of. At The Gin Tub in Hove, England, landlord Steve Tyler built a cage around the building to disrupt cellular service. He even went as far as wrapping the walls in aluminum foil and pinning copper wire mesh to the ceiling.
“I’ve seen it get worse and worse and I thought, ‘I want to stop,'” he told the BBC. “I want people to meet with the people they are with instead of the people they are not with.”
And there’s a reason he didn’t go out and buy an official cell phone jammer. “I made the brave decision not to block the signal with a jammer, but to make it as good as possible with a Faraday cage and get people to talk to each other,” he said. “And, to be honest, it worked very well.”
But if you’re worried about being utterly cut off from the outside world during your whiskey, fear not: Tyler plans to designate an outside area for cell phone use, similar to an outside smoking area. And of course the bar is equipped with a landline network for emergency calls.
So far the answer has been all positive. “I had a complaint from a customer and it was that she got a signal,” Tyler said. “We moved her to another table.” Imagine that.