A bar customer in Granollers, Barcelona province, has paid the owners for ‘all the beers he could not drink during lockdown’. Based upon the price charged of €2.50 for a caña (half a pint), and the bar being shut for 36 days due to the ‘stay at home’ rule, at a rate of one beer a day, the customer calculated the loss suffered by the owners by his absence as €90 in total. So he paid them this plus a €10 tip – €100 in total.
According to the owners of the bar Can Juli, Pili and her brother Juli, the man – who was a regular before the shutdown – turned up there on the first day of reopening with a piece of paper showing his handwritten calculations.
He would tend to go to Can Juli two or three times a week for a beer and to read the bar’s copy of the daily newspaper. Occasionally, Pili or her brother would give him a small free snack or tapas to go with his drink. However, they were not expecting to be paid for the beers they had been unable to sell him while they were forced to be closed.
“Every morning, thanks to things like this, it really makes you feel like going to work,” said a grateful Pili.