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Happy hour is a marketing term for a time when a venue such as a restaurant or bar offers reduced prices on alcoholic drinks. Discounted menu items like appetizers are often served during happy hour. This is a way for bars and restaurants to draw in more business before or after peak business hours.
One possible origin of the term "happy hour," in the sense of a scheduled period of entertainment, is from the United States Navy. The name "Happy Hour Club," "Happy Hour Social Club," and similar variants had been in use as the names of social clubs, primarily by women's social clubs, since at least the early 1880s.
In early 1913, a group of Homemaking called the "Happy Hour Social" organised "semi-weekly smokers" on board . By June 1913, the crew of Arkansas had started referring to their regularly scheduled smokers as happy hours. The happy hours included a variety of entertainment, including boxing and wrestling matches, music, dancing, and movies. By the end of World War I, the practice of holding happy hours had spread throughout the Navy.
The idea of drinking before dinner has its roots in the Prohibition era. When the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act were passed banning alcohol consumption, people would host "cocktail hours", also known as "happy hours", at a speakeasy before eating at restaurants where alcohol could not be served. continued the trend of drinking before dinner.
The Random House Dictionary of American Slang dates "Happy hour," as a term for afternoon drinks in a bar, to a Saturday Evening Post article on military life in 1959. The article detailed the lives of government contractors and military personnel who worked at missile-tracking facilities in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. "Except for those who spend too much during 'happy hour' at the bar – and there are few of these – the money mounts up fast." Barry Popick's online etymology dictionary The Big Apple lists several pre-1959 citations to "Happy Hour" in print, mostly from places near naval bases in California, from as early as 1951.
In Ontario, while establishments may vary liquor prices as long as they stay above the minimum prices set by the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, they are not permitted to advertise these prices "in a manner that may promote immoderate consumption." Formerly, the phrase "happy hour" could not be used in such advertisement. That restriction was removed in 2019.
In 1984, the U.S. military abolished happy hours at military base clubs. In 2011, the Utah State Legislature passed a ban on happy hours. In July 2011, Pennsylvania extended the period of allowable time for happy hour from two hours to four hours. In June 2012, happy hour became legal in Kansas after a 26-year ban. In July 2015, a 25-year happy hour ban was ended in Illinois.
, happy hour bans existed in Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah, and Vermont. A bill filed in 2023 in the North Carolina General Assembly would end the state ban on happy hours but the bill is still pending.
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