Local Knoxville bar Cool Beans has partnered with mobile nightlife ticketing corporation LineLeap to implement a new line skip fee for customers.
After social media rumors circulated about a new cover charge, Cool Beans denied the false claims.
“It’s just a line skip fee. There is no cover. So the whole narrative that, you know, ‘Cool Beans hasn’t had a cover in 26 years and now they’re charging a cover’ is not accurate by any means. We don’t have a cover. It costs $0 to walk in this bar. If somebody wants to skip the line, just like at any of the other locations around town, they can pay money and skip the line,” Cool Beans manager Brandon McDermott said.
LineLeap, popular in other college towns, has not been integrated into any Knoxville bar until Cool Beans.
“We’re grateful for Cool Beans and the relationship we’ve developed with them as kind of being the first mover on this,” LineLeap co-founder Max Schauff said.
He emphasized LineLeap’s mission of being “open and transparent” for customers at bars like Cool Beans.
“The bar should benefit, but the customer should have an elevated experience as well in having that optionality, and then of course for us, the value, too, is just giving that option to the customers,” Schauff said.
Heidi Browning, a University of Tennessee senior and agricultural communications major, said she had seen a false post about the bar charging cover on Instagram. As a Cool Beans customer, she described the importance of the bars’ previous policy of a singular, charge-free line.
“It’s the one bar on campus that I can think of that never has had a cover, no matter the time of day, no matter the season, no matter what event is going on,” Browning said. “You know that you can go to Cool Beans, get a cheap drink and still have a really good time and a really fun atmosphere. And I think it just proves to the other bars on campus that people will still come and wait in an incredibly long line because of just how promising the atmosphere there is.”
Because of the reliable role Cool Beans has played in the Knoxville bar scene, the addition of a line skip fee may cause confusion among students like Browning, who called the fee “unnecessary,” and said that it “defeats the purpose of saying that they don’t have a cover, because majority of the people are going to pay to skip that line.”
This will be Cool Beans’ first time implementing a line skip fee since their opening in 2000.
