But the bars are all teeming.
Drinking to forget.
A little meltdown number for you there.
In fact, bars, though they may - at least in this initial phase of denial - be holding up much better than many other kinds of business, are probably going to be hard hit this year. Most of the bars in Beijing were already pretty hard hit last year, with much of the resident expat population being flushed out of the city for the Olympics and foreign tourism taking a big dip also. And there's a huge over-supply of bars now, with so many new places having opened up in a blaze of misguided optimism last year - but now facing a dwindling in the numbers of free-spending laowai, as well as a more general decline in consumer spending.
We could probably run a Dead Pool game, predicting the first bar to go under. Several of the places I pilloried in my 2008 Bar Awards would be leading candidates, especially those in the Most Pointless New Bar category.
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