This article was originally published at HR Brew by Amanda Schiavo.
Welcome to HR 101. Class is now in session. Today’s discussion will focus on the history of happy hour.
The history. The first happy hour was in 1914, when the US Navy, in an attempt to entertain on-duty sailors, hosted an evening of food, music, and dancing. An April 1914 newspaper article described the sailors at one such happy hour as enjoying themselves “with as much abandon as though no war were in the air.”
Happy hour took on another meaning during prohibition, when the 18th amendment, ratified in 1919, barred the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the US. During this period, happy hour became a way to describe the illegal act of grabbing a drink between work and home, according to the Huffington Post.
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“For those law-breaking Americans who wanted to imbibe in secrecy, a kind of a 20th-century pre-game emerged,” Senior Editor Carla Herreria Russo reported. “Friends would meet at speakeasies or someone’s home before going out for dinner, thus creating the cocktail hour.”
When prohibition ended in 1933, Americans had fully embraced the idea of happy hour, turning it into a socially acceptable form of post-work entertainment, the Huffington Post article continued. And by the 1960s, restaurants and bars realized they could capitalize on it, offering cheap food and drinks as a way to get more customers in the door.