> No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not. > No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an im

> No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not. > No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many. Okay so I feel like you didn't really get my argument here. I said "if X, then Y", but it's obvious that Y isn't the case, so I'm implying that X also isn't true. So you informing my that Y isn't true hasn't added much to the conversation. An alcoholic drink without alcohol is just juice, the fact that there is no demand for juice at bars suggests that there would also be little demand for non-alcoholic drinks. Especially when you have to consume some weird gel afterwards. I was refuting your point by saying it implied something which isn't true. This is known as "reductio ad absurdum" and is a fairly common argumentative tactic. > I might know more about this than anyone you've ever met. Just because you've sold people drinks doesn't mean you understand why people buy them. I think you probably don't given you think this weird gel stuff could ever be popular. > sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious Alcohol-free cocktails exist. They are called "mocktails" and are very popular if I understand correctly. What the gel offers is the experience of a mocktail with the addition of a strange chemical jelly substance that you have to eat. No one is going to buy that. > she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance So now she will feel compelled to hide the fact that she's eating the gel. You've just shifted the problem forward a few seconds. Either she drinks, or she doesn't drink and hides it. Changing the mechanism of how it's hidden doesn't change the fact that she's hiding it. This is a product that simply sounds good in theory without offering much practically. > having an experience with a bartender It's fun because the bartender is getting drunk. If the bartender was just taking shots of water, I don't think it would work as well. A shot of Vodka minus the alcohol is essentially a shot of water with a funny aftertaste, which is what you are proposing. I suppose you could trick customers into tipping this way by hiding the gel, but you could also do that by discretely swapping a shot out for plain water. I just think people would get a little suspicious if the bartender is knocking back shots and not getting drunk. > I'll bet the higher-performing athletes would relish the opportunity to go to a frat party and drink alcohol as a social exercise without totally screwing up their training schedule Again, you assume that drinking liquid is the social aspect, but it isn't. The social thing, as you have said earlier, is getting drunk which this gel prevents. If you drink a glass of cider then down this gel, you have just drunk a glass of apple juice, and as we've established, juice and alcohol have different social purposes.