Goodtymes Pub Employees Serve Customers Responsibly

In the Saturday, Dec. 30, edition of the Valley Voice, you printed an article accusing the Goodtymes Pub of overserving our customers. The article stated that there were many complaints, many Liquor board issues, and many drunk driving arrests. The article also stated that “(t)he owner of Goodtymes failed to return several calls seeking her comment.”

That statement, like nearly everything else about the article, was false. I am the owner of the Goodtymes Pub. I was never called for comments. This is my side of the story, which the people of the Spokane Valley have the right to know.

The Dec. 30 article strongly implied that the Goodtymes was irresponsible about overservice of alcohol. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every one of my employees is trained by the Liquor Board on how to watch for and prevent overservice of alcohol. We follow Liquor Board procedures and suggestions.

We cut off many people, including our regular customers, because we believe that while a person should have a good time, they shouldn’t take that good time on the road. If we have served an intoxicated person, we buy back the drink, and serve free nonalcoholic drinks thereafter. We have paid cab fares, and we babysit people who were overserved at other places, and we do these things all the time.

On New Year’s Eve, after the article was published, the Liquor Board came to the Goodtymes, but couldn’t find a single violation. The Liquor Board agents then visited another bar, which was favorably compared to the Goodtymes in the Brian Coddington article, and found two violations.

Because he never talked to me before writing about my place, and obviously didn’t watch my hard-working employees, Brian Coddington couldn’t have known these things. But he could have checked his facts before misleading readers in other ways.

For example, he compared numbers of arrests for drunk driving in which the driver “opted to name his last watering hole,” between the Goodtymes and other places. But since the vast majority of people arrested did not name the place they had been drinking, the comparison is obviously invalid.

Also, because so many more people come to the Goodtymes than to some of the other taverns named, it is unfair to simply compare numbers of arrests, without also pointing out the percentages of customers. Thanks to the conscientious efforts of hard-working people, those percentages are tiny or nonexistent at the Goodtymes.

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