A lot of old-timey saloons would just put out a lunch buffet and as long as you bought one drink you could take what you like. Pretty good food by some accounts.
I talked to my Dad and he claimed this was still a thing in a few places as late as the early-80s, there were places with “happy hour” where they would put out a small buffet like once a week. He said in college he’d go to them and buy one beer and fill up.
You should brush up on your reading comprehension because the lunch was literally free, people did not pay for lunch or, if we consider your view, far less than what the lunch is worth. The point is that you could pay only for the cost of beer and the lunch comes free. If you bothered to read the Wikipedia article you would see that “These establishments included a “free” lunch, which varied from rudimentary to quite elaborate, with the purchase of at least one drink. These free lunches were typically worth far more than the price of a single drink.[1] The saloon-keeper relied on the expectation that most customers would buy more than one drink, and that the practice would build patronage for other times of day.”
It was a marketing strategy for bars, sell at a loss and gain a profit another way. The point remains however that they would literally give you a lunch for free, something that I did not know actually happened.
Oh, good for you. You JUST learned what the song meant and got to awkwardly (yet incorrectly) use it in the real world! I bet you’re super proud of yourself 😊
Narrator: And here we see the lib poster, he neither hears or sees himself. In this hostile world of posts, he relies on the pack to survive, their shibboleths are designed to cause a herding behavior giving them safety in numbers, but today he has wondered far from the pack. Def and blind, he calls to pack, but his calls only draw the attention of the lingering critical minds slumbering within the threads…
