re: Mellow Mushroom cancels karaoke night due to violence

quote:

---

This business will get out of control! It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it!

---

When were the glory days?

quote:

---

I’ve found that when undesirable behaviour isn’t at least passively discouraged, it encourages it and those that propagate it multiply, while driving off good, decent customers.


And then word gets out and no one but the trash wants to go there anyway.

---

This happened at the Varsity about 12-15 years ago when it was the "place to be" and the 80's retro nights drew big crowds.

For a little while, they had "hip-hop night" on Thursdays, and you can imagine what kind of crowd that attracted.

Some of the crowd that had fun on Thursdays then started finding their way to the Varsity on Fridays and Saturdays, too, and the change in demographic of the crowd was definitely noticeable.

Over time, when the "change in crowd" on Fridays and Saturdays became noticeable enough, some of the regulars on those nights quit coming.

Well a couple of months in, hip-hop night on Thursday got out of hand and someone got shot outside the Varsity around 2am. (not sure if the guy lived or died).

At that point, the Varsity completely did away with hip-hop night. Soon thereafter, the Friday/Saturday night demographic was back to where it started, nobody was getting shot out front, and things were normal again.

So the point is, the Mellow Mushroom did exactly the right thing by ditching karaoke night. The trouble-making trash will find something else to do and before long MM will be back how it used to be. The slight hit they will take over the short-term on lost revenue will be replaced when the actual paying customers return.