The Josh Innes Show - Bars Are Expensive

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Jilly and I went to downtown Detroit for the Yacht Rock Revue concert. We stopped at an Irish Pub for some beers and apps. When I got the bill I was blown away by how ridiculously expensive it was. Why do people ever leave the house? Also, I've learned about the dumb Michigan Bottle Deposit... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome in All Up Innes. How are you? Smooth up in us. Hope your day is going well whenever you're listening to this. It is currently 428. And I have been sitting here for the last almost 15 minutes. I got here about as early as I've gotten here. I was here at about 413 is when I walked in and sat down. And my mind has just been blank. I have not been able to think of anything to get into. Like I'm sure I'll I'll get there, but I've sat here for the last 13 minutes, just racking my brain. Like, I have no fucking clue what to talk about today. Like, I have, I'm, look, I went to the Yacht Rock Review concert last night, and generally speaking, I don't enjoy tribute bands, but Yacht Rock Review is a special brand of awesome. But I've also slept like a grand total of five hours in the last, you know, since Sunday. since I got up on Sunday, went to sleep Sunday night at like 10.30.

So for me, that was early. Like, I got a relatively early snooze in on Sunday. So, Tuesday morning or Monday morning, you get up. Yesterday I got up after like two and a half hours of sleep. Last night I went to sleep around 11, so I guess I got like four plus hours of sleep last night. So that's something. but that and look I generally speaking don't booze during the week that's just not like I think people

think that I just sit around and drink all the time I don't usually Friday Saturday Sunday is when I drink I'll go to a bar on Fridays I'll sit at home watch college football and have some beers on Saturdays and then Sunday it's the NFL and I sit at home and I drink beer after that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, generally speaking, middle of the week, I am on the wagon. But this week's a little bit tougher. Let me play a couple commercials, and we will continue. So last night, I go to Yacht Rock Review. There's great local bars in downtown Detroit.

Detroit is a great town. I love the vibe of it. I love the just everything. I dig it. I am a big fan of this city. But we went into this Irish bar, and you're thinking, okay, an Irish pub, and you're like, we should be able to snag some cheap beers. And the price of the beers weren't anywhere to be found.

So, you know, they had Yingling Flight on draft, and Yingling Flight is a big deal here because it just got here. Yingling just arrived like last week or two weeks ago. I forgot when Yingling actually got here, but it's a big deal. Like, if you're in Pennsylvania, you're like, who gives a shit? We've had Yingling forever. You walk into a bar, you say, give me a logger. They know exactly what you mean, and you go about your day. It is a big deal when a state gets yingling.

So I got a yingling flight, and I had about four of those yesterday. We sat in the bar for about an hour or so, a little over an hour. Had some cheese sticks, which were unimpressive. These are cheese sticks that you can, I mean, just seem like they were straight out of a bag, like frozen cheese sticks. Like, you can tell when you get the good shit versus the, oh, I could. could have made this in the air fryer and probably done it better cheese sticks. Like walk-ons, and I don't know, do they, is there walk-ons in Houston now? I don't know.

But like walk-ons has these gigantic logs of cheese that are just spectacular and they're delicious. And so do it. Like, I think pluckers had them too. And like, you can tell when you get the good shit versus, like, these were frozen and they just aren't very good. And the cheese isn't very pully. and the mariner sauce is cold and like and that's kind of what these were so I wasn't expecting the food to be much of anything and it wasn't because all we did was cheese sticks but we had six pints of yingling flight and cheese sticks okay six yingling flight pints and cheese sticks we're at an Irish pub it is a Tuesday night there is a baseball game happening down the road so like there's probably more people in there

than there would be, if there weren't a baseball game. I get the bill, and I think gratuity was included. The fucking bill was over $70. And a fucking Irish bar with just mediocre cheese sticks and yingling. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here? So we're like, we got to get the fuck out of here. Like, I put that one on the list of places that I have no desire to go back to. I'm not spending $70 on six pints of.

beer, right? So, but then we go to one of these older bars in Detroit. It's called the Detroiter. And the Detroiter is like an iconic bar downtown. And the food is supposed to be really good as well. So we go in, get a seat at the bar. It's got immaculate vibes. You know, there's a bunch of people in there getting ready for the Yacht Rock review because it's right next door. So a bunch of, like, middle-aged men wearing captain's hats and Hawaiian shirts. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Didn't have a captain's hat. But like, you know, We're here for Yacht Rock Review. We're ready to go.

We get into this bar, and this bar, we get jelly orders like a ham and cheese sandwich, and I ordered a corn beef sandwich, which is one of the best corned beef sandwiches I've ever eaten, by the way. I'm not a big corned beef guy, more pastrami guy over corned beef. One of the best corned beef sandwiches I've ever eaten. And we each get, I want to say, like, two or three beers. I think we each got two, maybe. So like two beers, maybe three. I might have gotten three.

I'm not sure. and a sandwich and each of us got a sandwich and fries with one of them the total ended up being like $30 I'm like fuck this like this one's 30 bucks so like that actually worked out pretty well you know like I can handle 30 something dollars for for you know dinner and a couple of beers the other fucking place can get bent like what the fuck are we doing man and jillie's like well those are downtown prizes I'm like no that's just bullshit then she's like well what if it's because yingling is like new And I'm like, listen, ain't nobody on the planet.

Like, if you do the math on this, like, let's just say the bill was like 60-something bucks. I didn't look exactly. It was, I just knew that it was 70-something after the included gratuity, okay? So let's say it was 60, say 70 bucks. I don't know, 68 bucks. You're talking, what, like $8, $8, $16, $24, $32, $40, $48. So probably like $7 a beer for yingling or, like, what are we doing? What the fuck are we?

do it. The other place was $3, you know, $3 for a can of beer, like, which, again, is still ridiculous when you think of how much you, like, why anybody would ever go out and get drunk out out of, like, the house is beyond me, right? Because, like, you go to these bars, if you go to the right ones, you're pretty good, like, we usually do pretty well at our home bar there that we go to on Fridays, and they give you the big beers, you know, like 24-ounce beers, food and everything. And, like, the bill the other night was probably, you know, 70 bucks or something like that, but that included dinner, that included, you know, the handful of beers that we drank, you know, and they were big beers. I think that's pretty cool.

But I don't know why anybody would take on downtown anywhere or try to go to anywhere trendy. Like, when you really think about it, all right, when you really sit there and think about how absurd it is that you are taking the time to go downtown, you drive from, you know, your house, which is 10, 12 miles, whatever from downtown, you go downtown. when you think about the fact that you're spending $7 for a pint of beer, $8 for a pint of beer, when you could go to Kroger and get 30 bushlights for $19. And speaking of beers here, so they charge like a per beer tax. There's like a tax on every beer you buy. So I forgot how much the tax is, but like let's say you spend $19. It's $19 to go to Kroger, $20 to get a $30.

pack. There is a tax on each one of those beers. Let me actually see what that number is. It's absurd. It goes from like 20 bucks to like 22, 23 bucks. Let's see how much. Was it 10 cents a can maybe? Michigan beer tax. Michigan beer. Like what is the, I don't know exactly how much like beer tax per can. I got what the number is. Let's see. Let's see. The wholesale tax is $6.30 per barrel. There is a tax, basically, that goes, oh, here we go. Bottle deposit. The state also imposes a 10-cent deposit on most beverage containers, including beer cans.

This is a refundable charge, not a tax. So that means if you want to fill up a garbage bag of all the cans that you drank from over the course of the weekend, you can take them to these little centers, these little centers where you can essentially recycle them and you'll get paid per can. How about you do this? How about you just don't charge me 10 cents per fucking can? You buy a 30 pack of beer. You're spending three extra dollars.

And they're banking on you being too lazy to go in and bring these cans back, which I am. Also, you can't just bring them back just anywhere. Like Kroger in a bunch of places have these canned machines. But like, let's say you bought a craft beer. that you can, you know, that you can buy at, like, total wine, but they don't sell at Kroger. You cannot bring those cans back to Kroger. You have to bring them to a place that would sell those beers.

Then, not only that, let's say you smash one of the cans. They cannot be altered. Those cans cannot be crushed. Those cans cannot be slightly dented. You have to bring those cans back, like full can. So I've never brought any of these back, but I think I'm going to start just because this thing pisses me off. Like, I don't know how much you get back. You get 10 cents back per can.

So in theory, you would be able to bring that 30 pack back to Kroger and you'd score, you know, three bucks. But who the hell knows? Yeah, I mean, I probably should do that. I mean, it's dumb. Like the fact that this exists is dumb. If it's a refundable thing, and I know you're counting on people being too lazy to do it, which, I mean, I've already been too late. easy to do it. So obviously it's working for you in some way. I would just like to know where this money goes. I would like to know where the bottle deposit money goes. Now I'm just getting

angry about it. Where does Michigan bottle deposit money go? In Michigan, unclaimed bottle deposit money is first allocated to the bottle bill enforcement fund for state police. Then 75% of the remaining funds go to the Cleanup and Redevelopment Trust Fund for Environmental Cleanup and Pollution Prevention Programs and the other 25% is returned to retailers to offset their costs of collecting returns. The first one million of unclaimed deposits goes to the Michigan State Police

for enforcing the bottle deposit law. Cleanup and redevelopment and retailers. Important details. Funding breakdown. With the trust fund, funds are dispersed as follows. 80% for the cleanup. Okay, we've said all that. I don't know.

They're certainly counting on people being lazy bastards like me. There's no doubt about that. They're like, these lazy sons of bitches aren't going to bring it back and we're all going to reap the benefits because there's no doubt they do. But then there are some people who are full on committed to it. Like the other day I'm walking into Kroger.

This dude's got two full shopping carts filled with boxes and garbage bags all of cans, just rolling into Kroger like Yolo. I'm like, all right, brother, have that. So I do have a garbage bag full of cans. I mean, like, I recycle them anyway, which is like, whatever. I'm not some sort of environmental person or whatever. I don't recycle things because, like, oh, I feel like it's my duty to do them or to recycle them.

I recycle shit because it's just there's tons of space in the recycling garbage can that otherwise would fill up my other garbage can to make it more difficult to throw shit away in the regular garbage can. I don't recycle shit because I'm a good person. I don't recycle shit because I'm like, hey, we're saving the fishes and shit. I'm recycling shit just for the... It's truly about space. It's garbage-canned space. So now, maybe I'm going to start. Maybe we'll keep a count on that.

That's another way, I guess, to keep count of how many beers you consume during the season. Which, by the way, speaking of that, I can give you an update on the number of beers I have consumed during this football season. And that is only at home, okay? These are beers I have consumed at the house during football games. It doesn't count like, oh, it's Friday, and I went out to the bar and had six, 24-ounce beers, right? Like, I'm not counting those, right? You know, you had 12 beers at the bar. It does not count.

I'm only counting beers that I purchased for home. So in week one, let's see, I had 34 beers. Week two, I had 34 beers. this week I had 19 beers my number went way down now part of that is because I didn't drink for three days we went out to the bar on Friday as opposed to stayed home on Friday and then we didn't have a Monday night thing either so I only had two days of drinking and for whatever reason I was just balls tired all weekend and didn't feel like consuming as much so 19 is the number this week So total, 36 and 36, or 34 and 34 is 68, plus 11 is 79, plus 8 is 87.

So through three weeks of the NFL season, I am consuming, I have consumed 87 beers at home during football season. That does not include shots and that does not include what we have when we're out at the bar. like last night and then I bought oh and then I go to the yacht rock review concert great shit great time middle-aged coos everywhere just good looking older broads walking around and like sailor hats and skirts and shit they're having a great fucking time we get two 25 ounce coors lights all right two 25 ounce coors lights at the venue I can't figure out how to change the tip setting Like I hit custom and won't let me type anything in. So the two 24-ounce beers and the tip cost $35.

Might have been more, actually. Like, holy she. Actually, I think it was more. I think it was $40-something. Like, what the fuck? And then I was just buzzed enough to go back and do it again. I'm like, I'm not going to have another beer during Yacht Rock Review. They're up there doing, you know, she's gone.

Like, I'm not going to fucking miss. out on unjoined that by not getting a beer. We bought four beers and a tall can of liquid death. And I'm fairly certain I spent close to $70, $80 for that. When you really, when you're drunk, you don't think about it. Like you notice and you're like, boy, that's heavy, but hey, we're having a good time. When you wake up the next morning, 3.45 in the morning, still semi-buzzed, you're driving to work, you know, like, fuck. And you get to work. and then you start thinking about the money you spent last night, and you're like, think about this dip shit. You had a great time going to the Yacht Rock Review concert where the tickets were only 15 bucks and the parking was only 10 bucks.

So it cost you about a grand total of 40 bucks to go to the Yot Rock show and you had a great fucking time. That's amazing. But then you think about the fact that between the goddamn Irish bar and the goddamn venue itself, you spent probably damn near $150 on like not even the same number of beers you would have gotten for $20 at Kroger. And when you think about it that way, how do you sit back and go, yeah, it was good that I went out last night. Now, that said, oh, I've got to share this with you. I'll do this in the next episode. But my boss sent me tickets for tonight's Tigers game.

And I fully anticipated on just sleeping and, you know, staying at home because that's where I catch up on my sleep. You know, like I sleep very little. But then during the week, once there's no NFL on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, That's kind of where I catch up on my sleep because Thursday, there's going to be Thursday night football. Friday, I'm going to go out to the bar. Saturday, there's college football. Sunday, there's the pros. Monday, it's Monday night football.

And the cycle continues. Tuesday and Wednesday is the, hey, let's go to sleep at like 10 o'clock so you can sleep for damn near six hours, which isn't a lot of time. I get it, but it's, you know, a lot for me. Fine, cool. But my boss sent me tickets to the Tigers. And by the way, they're collapsing. They're only five and a half games up with, what do they have, 11 to play? But anyway, we'll get into that too.

This is these tickets. Holy shit.