In Mourning

Wednesday is supposed to be a List day, and indeed, I started writing my article on the best places in the city for cheap pitchers, leading with that old standby - the Green Room.

Then, I came across these articles from the Torontoist.

Lights Out for the Green Room? - October 13, 2010
The Green Room Stays Closed - October 14, 2010
How the Green Room Got Closed for Good - October 15, 2010

And so, I mourn.

Look - I'm not a fan of rat droppings in food, or whatever the heck the Green Room got shut down for. But you know what else I'm not a fan of? Paying $8-$9 for a pint of beer, no matter how excellent it is. Which is what I routinely end up paying at Dora's or at C'est What. (Actually, at-least Dora's and C'est What have excellent beer, a lot of crap-beer places seem to charge $8 as well.)

In Toronto, beer seems to be a rich-person thing, which is appalling. There's a legislative price floor on bottled beer. (Here's some reasons why.) The Beer Store is owned by brewers - an staggering conflict-of-interest in a monopoly. Pints are expensive. Happy hours are relatively unknown.

I made up a beer affordability index, if you will. I took the minimum wage in a country (in international dollars), divided it by the price of a pint, and came up with the number of pints you could drink with your minimum-wage money.

The results match my gut-feel on this - it is expensive to drink in Canada.

Country	Price of a Pint (CAD)	Minimum wage per year (Intl $)	Number of pints I can buy with my minimum wage
Canada	$5.49	16,710	3,044
Australia	$5.49	20,027	3,648
UK	$5.18	22,597	4,362

(Price of beers from PintPrice. Minimum wages from Wikipedia.)


And so I mourn the demise of a place where pitchers of beer were $13 (tax included) every single day.

Good-bye, Green Room.