Uncharitable prohibitionists snuff out fund-raising

Advocates of forbidding private businesses to allow their customers to smoke are fond of claiming the bans have little impact on business, and whatever loss of patronage there is is purely temporary as smokers adjust to the new normal. At least for some businesses, though, that's not proving to be true. According to the New York Times, charity bingo games are withering and dying wherever cigarettes have been snuffed out.

In Minnesota, which adopted a statewide ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces in October, revenue from all charity gambling dropped nearly 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007, compared to the same quarter the year before, according to state officials. More than half of the drop — the equivalent of about $100 million annually — was attributed to the new law, they said.

Charlie Lindstrom, who runs the bingo nights at an American Legion post in Fergus Falls, Minn., said some of his former customers now drove to casinos on Indian reservations, where they can puff away, or across the border to Fargo, N.D., where veterans’ organizations are exempt from that state’s smoking ban.

...

Mr. Lindstrom is not alone. Managers of charity bingo games in California, New Jersey, New York and Washington State also say their states’ smoking bans have forced cutbacks in their budgets and in their support for various causes.

Few believe they can cultivate new nonsmoking players. They say smoking goes with bingo like peanut butter with jelly. Michael J. Surwill, bingo chairman at Elks Lodge No. 2501 in Ocean Springs, Miss., estimated that smokers outnumbered nonsmokers three to one at the lodge’s weekly game.

And the dip in fund-raising doesn't appear to be a temporary phenomenon either.

[B]ingo managers in states where bans on smoking have been in effect longer say nonsmokers cannot make up for the decline in revenues from smokers. Instead, they say, their industry has undergone a wave of forced consolidation.

“We actually benefited from it, but for the wrong reason — my competition was forced to close,” said Clyde Bock, bingo manager for the Ruth Dykeman Children’s Center in Seattle.

When Washington’s ban on smoking took effect in 2005, Mr. Bock was able to partially enclose a porch where bingo players could still smoke, and he got it approved as a separate facility. “It cost me $8,000, but it protected my customer base,” he said. “Other games weren’t so lucky.”

Still, revenues are down. In 2006, the bingo operation at the children’s center, which then belonged to Big Brothers Big Sisters, generated about $325,000 a year, after expenses, and employed 17 people. A year later, under the auspices of the center, it produced $150,000 and employed 13 people.

“People underestimate the impact smoking bans will have,” Mr. Bock said.

Washington used to be home to 100 bingo halls that raised money for charity. Now there are fewer than 20.

Culturally, it seems, bingo really is linked to smoking. If you take smoking out of the game, the players go elsewhere. Maybe they stay at home, or maybe they play bingo at friends houses where they can smoke, but they don't go to fund-raiser bingo games.

The article doesn't delve into the issue, but I have to assume that's a particular problem for charity-related games. Where a neighborhood bar can thumb its nose at the law and pay a few fines that amount to less than the profits from disobedience, or an underground-economy entrepreneur can operate a smoking-friendly business completely in the shadows (like the strip-joint smoke-easies proliferating in Cleveland), Big Brothers/Big Sisters or a children's hospital have limited options. By and large, they really don't want to be linked to civil disobedience or shadow economic activity. The charities are well and truly screwed.

Eventually, the charities will find new ways of raising funds. In the meantime, though, the fate of bingo games serves as an object lesson in the economic damage wreaked by restrictive laws on businesses that don't have the option of defying those laws. The customers offended by those laws can go elsewhere, including underground; the businesses just suffer.