Comment by notesinthefield
Comment by notesinthefield a day ago
I am overwhelmed with the thought of nearly 82 thousand bars within a country roughly the size of Ohio.
Comment by notesinthefield a day ago
I am overwhelmed with the thought of nearly 82 thousand bars within a country roughly the size of Ohio.
South Korea has 5x the population of Ohio, but around 27x the number of bars [1]. So it really is a lot of bars.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/industry/ohio/bars-nightclubs/1...
They drink more than Eastern and Northern Europeans. It's insane!
The entire US and North America is massively more empty relative to almost anywhere else, even most perceptually sparse countries. Many of European countries are 5-10x denser than US.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_densitySnark aside - I used this site which compares the country question to the location closest to you. I live in ohio. https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unit...
That country has a population of 52 million, i.e. about 5 times Ohio.
Sure, but Ohio has ~4200 bars[0]. Which is roughly 1/4 the ratio of bars to people.
[0]: https://rentechdigital.com/smartscraper/business-report-deta...
Just to compare, they also have a tour for the UK https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/uk/index.html : 49,687 pubs.
They are such an urban phenomenon. A largely empty rural state, with the legacy of prohibition, where you have to drive? That's going to have way fewer drinking locations. A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism. Many of the UK pubs pre-date the invention of the car; "peak pub" appears to have been the late 1800s with over 100,000.
I'm impressed that Korea has more than the UK, but this is definitely going to be a matter of size and the tiny Korean bars.
> A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism.
I don't think that's really true. In the UK, villages had pubs. Gradually some of the villages were joined together into larger cities, and the pubs remained. It wasn't planned as walkable urbanism.
I don't think bars in Korea have parking minimums like they do in Ohio.
A lot of bars in walkable cities fit about 10 or fewer people. East Asia in particular has loads of tiny bars.
Plus being able to walk or take a train home makes them far more accessible for people than needing to drive home.
This is also upper-bounded by the law; Ohio only issues one class D-5 liquor license (license to sell beer, wine, and spirits) per 2000 residents, which roughly maxes it out at ~5950 bars (in practice this looks to be rounded up on a per-town basis, making this an underestimate). An Ohio with the population of South Korea would only be allowed ~25000 bars.
82k places in Korea include any restaurant or joint or karaoke with a license to serve alcohol. Personally I would not care to call 80% of them "bar".
So in Ohio probably everything with class C and D license. How many is not public but probably many times more than 4k.
Many actual street level bona fide bars in Seoul (which has half of all the people of the entire country and the most bars by far) are tiny rooms that fit a few people each. But you always have a "bar street" with 50 of those next to each other.
Ok, that gets the numbers in line -- there are about 27,000 liquor licenses in Ohio, according to a random Google, which is about the same per capita.
South Korea apparently ranks #97 on alcohol deaths, so it's apparently not a problematic number of bars, by global standards.
What's really cool is if you go to a site like [0] that shows the "true" size of countries etc. (i.e. not distorted by a projection), Indiana is probably the most analogous state to South Korea, in terms of size and shape. But South Korea has 7x the population of Indiana!
Really puts into perspective a movie like "Train to Busan", which would be like taking a train from Gary to Madison!
I checked a few and there's a lot of restaurants included.
https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/data/korea81998.xy.t...
Looks like they got their hands on a dataset of every restaurant that is licensed to serve alcohol -- or at least a decent subset of such restaurants, filtered by menu or whatever.
I checked a few dots near where I live and they're all fried chicken joints. Yeah, we do love chimaek around here. :)
Many countries have much more used “public” spaces, and people spend much more time in them, together.
The idea of driving home to the suburbs and locking yourself into your private home is very North American.
I just got back from10 months across Europe. The number of people in public places eating, chatting and just spending time (no simply going somewhere) makes LA or Chicago look like a ghost town.
I think it’s far fewer, probably under 5,000 if we are really talking about “bars” and not any ole liquor licensed establishment such as a restaurant…
It seems like you're pretty close with that guess.
https://www.ibisworld.com/us/industry/ohio/bars-nightclubs/1... (2025) estimates there are about 3,000 "bars and nightclubs" in Ohio.
And https://vinepair.com/articles/map-states-with-most-bars/ (2022) estimates there are 1800 bars in Ohio, apparently placing it in the Top 10 of states with the most bars.
After living there for about four years, my mind goes immediately to soju. Not sure if there is a connection, but that’s something I might deep dive with an LLM today.
"Bar" doesn't mean the same thing in every country. In Spain although a bar serves alcohol of all kinds it is also where one eats breakfast and lunch and gets a coffee. They are indispensable social centers and even a tiny town of 150 has one.
americans always compare massive cities to empty states