Re:The Disappearance of the Ashtray
by ashtonbaker on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @12:21AM
(#34499693)
You might be around the same age as me. Michigan didn't ban smoking in restaurants until 2010, when I graduated high school. I think some (most?) restaurants phased it out earlier, but the sort of places we used to hang out at back then in small-town MI certainly did not, so it remained a common part of our lives all through childhood and high school. I kind of forgot about that.
> It did absolutely nothing in smaller buildings though.
I remember restaurants where the nonsmoking section was a little back room, you'd have to walk through all the smoke to get there. Then at some point, it flipped, and that was the smoking section.
I also remember when the Wynn opened in Vegas, and you could gamble without smoke. Still not very fun, but at least I could breathe.
In parts of the US this question was common in restaurants through at least the late 90s, maybe a bit longer.
As someone who was a kid during that time period, I heard it many times at a buffet-style steakhouse my family would go to for get-togethers, birthdays, etc. It's fuzzy but I think they may have even still asked into the 2000s. We took the smoking section through most of my childhood since my parents smoked, but they quit later on so we switched.
At least that building was big enough to where the division kind of made a difference… it had a very high ceiling and was huge. It did absolutely nothing in smaller buildings though.