Why You Should Never Buy Your Friend a Drink

What’s most surprising about buyyourfriendadrink.com (no, we’re not going to link to it) isn’t that this useless site exists in the first place—it’s that it took this long for somebody to come up with a way to harness the power of the Internet to buy drinks. Essentially, you go to the site and enter in all of the contact info of somebody who is ostensibly your friend (we tried visiting BuyYourAcquaintenceADrink.com, as well as BuyYourCoWorkerADrink.com, but no dice), and they’ll receive a text message or email with a little digital numeric code that they then take to a bartender, where they can redeem it for a drink. The idea is that you can use this service if you’re, say, stuck at work, and your pals are out having a good time. However, the site doesn’t indicate if buying a drink is supposed to be seen as a gesture of goodwill towards your friends, or if giving all of their contact info out to a business that inevitably puts it on a bunch of spam mailing lists is supposed to be a way to get back at them for going out without you. Regardless, there are only a few bars that are even set up to work with the site, and those sites are limited to the greater New York City area (sorry, Topeka!). But the list of bars is ever-growing, constantly adding such fine establishments as Señor Swanky’s (birth place of the “world famous” Swankarita), and Wicked Willy’s (“The Villages [sic] newest and hippest bar.”) to its stable of wired watering holes. If your friend can’t find a bar that he or she likes, they can even redeem the drink’s monetary value at Pay Pal, which is sort of just like giving your friend cash, though with the added benefit of being charged a one dollar transaction fee by buyyourfriendadrink.com (once again, we aren’t going to link to it). Call me old fashioned, but I remember when “transaction fees” went by another name: tips.