> If what you're saying is true, bars should sell just as much fruit juice as they do booze.
No-- sharing alcoholic beverages is symbolic in a way fruit juice is not.
> If it's true, then no one should mind being the designated driver.
No-- many people enjoy being intoxicated and sharing alcoholic beverages is an important social bonding exercise to many.
> I don't know if you've ever been out for drinks, but the reason you go is to get drunk.
I worked in bars and nightclubs as a bouncer and bartender for nearly two decades and was a 4-or-5-days-per-week regular in them for about a decade. After not having been to bars frequently in at least 5 years, I've got at least half a dozen bars I could walk into right now and not pay for alcohol. I might know more about drinking in public than anyone you've ever met.
> Sometimes you want to be more on the tipsy end than on the blackout end, but that is still drinking. The difference between drinking and a tea party is alcohol, and it blows my mind that you don't think that's significant.
Maybe you should re-read what I wrote. Not once did I even intimate that drinking alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages isn't significantly different. What you don't seem to realize is that it's not different in the same way for everybody. Believe it or not, you can't generalize your preferences and experiences to everyone else. You just can't.
> The people who want to meet up and drink something without alcohol go to cafés, not bars.
Some do. My wife doesn't really drink, hates the smell of coffee, and worked in the service industry for 25 years. When she wants to meet up with friends, she goes to a bar. Not only is it the traditional meeting venue among people we know, it's got an entirely different energy than a cafe does. Usually she drinks seltzer with lemon, but sometimes she has a cocktail because she loves the social act of drinking together and thinks they taste delicious, but always regrets the grogginess, headaches, and other side-effects she gets from alcohol. Sometimes when there's a big round of shots going around-- a very common social bonding tradition, especially among service industry workers-- she often feels compelled to hide the fact that she surreptitiously slipped me the shot because I have a much higher tolerance. I discretely hand the empty glass back to her and she puts it down. This has happened literally dozens of times. If there was a way for her to partake in the shot or have a cocktail with friends while not having the requisite physical effects, she'd jump on it.
Beyond that, bartenders doing shots with customers is a huge money maker. When customers feel like they're having an experience with a bartender rather than one provided by a bartender, it's an entirely different experience. It's more fun for the customers, sometimes more fun for the bartenders, and usually elicits much bigger tips. A bartender being able to consume a bunch of alcohol and maintain coherency would be a huge boon. Right now, a lot of them just do a bunch of coke or chew on adderall-- beyond maybe 30 that loses its appeal pretty quickly. That's what the line cooks did in an 'edgy' place I cooked at with an open kitchen where customers could buy the kitchen staff beer. We were expected to drink it and look like we're having fun in an extremely high-volume, high-performance kitchen. Lots of key bumps and popped pills would be replaced with a product that made it unnecessary.
> There's a good reason why these two things haven't been combined.
... they haven't? Some cafes serve alcohol-- several coffee/pastry shops in my city serve wine and cocktails. Even a few of the breakfast/lunch focused diners have full bars. Brunch is essentially breakfast with optional cocktails. Some bars serve coffee. I worked as a chef at a little rock club that was a portuguese expat bar during the day-- old timers would line up outside at 8am waiting for the doors to open up so they could sip espresso, read the newspaper, and chat. Some would occasionally have a brandy at some point, some would stay for lunch and have a beer. Many wouldn't, and were just there for the community.
One of the most popular nightclubs in a city I lived in opened at 2am-- after the legally mandated last call time-- and they never sold one drop of alcohol. Some people went there to use other kinds of drugs. Lots of people went there who didn't drink but enjoyed being in a nightclub atmosphere without the pressure to drink. Some were recovering alcoholics. Some just wanted to dance after other clubs had closed and drank a lot beforehand. Some were underage and it was the only club they could get into. Some tried to sneak their own alcohol in, though security was necessarily tight for legal reasons and they rarely succeeded.
One large raucous club I bounced at was near several large colleges. Knowing it was a magnet for bad behavior, the sports teams would send in members of their disciplinary staff undercover to spy on students-- I'll bet many of them would jump at the opportunity to drink something other than soda while finely controlling their intoxication level. Hell, 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. It would certainly make hazing a lot safer.
People's relationship with alcohol is just not that cut-and-dried. It's an incredibly complex topic, and you can't just take your experience and use case for something and superimpose it on the rest of humanity. It just doesn't work like that.
You know far less about this topic than you think you do.