Pull-tabs aren’t as popular as they used to be at the Sloop, but owner Patrick Files says they are still part of the bar’s culture.
When Patrick Files’s dad bought the Sloop Tavern in 1999, the Ballard bar earned enough money selling pull-tabs to pay its rent every month. That’s no longer the case. But even now, decades later, when you walk up to the bar at the Sloop, you can still buy some pull-tabs with your beer.
What are pull-tabs? This is a question that many a transplant has asked upon their first visit to a dive bar in Washington. It’s one that Files says he still gets “constantly” at the Sloop. Pull-tabs are a low-stakes legal gambling mechanism; bars and nonprofit social clubs (Elks Lodges, say) can sell them to customers with permission from the Washington State Gambling Commission. You might recognize them behind the bar: those colorful little pieces of paper in tanks.
The mechanism is simple: Each pull-tab game has a predetermined number of winning tabs in it, with the odds and potential prizes listed on a poster called a flare. You buy the tab for anywhere between 25 cents and $5, pull it apart, and, if you win, you get paid by the bar on the spot in cash. The bartender then marks prizes over $20 on the flare so that future players know that those winning tabs are no longer
in play. Once the tank empties to the point of diminishing returns, and the big prizes are all gone, the bar removes the tank from play.
It’s gambling at its most simple, quite literally a “cheap thrill,” says Files. And while they are not unique to Washington (pull-tabs are also popular in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and are legal in more than a dozen other states), they are a part of the state’s bar culture.
“Pull-tabs are probably the one consistent thing we’ve had,” says Bill McGregor, a special agent who has been with the Washington State Gambling Commission since 1989 and seen firsthand the decline of bingo parlors, for instance. “They really haven’t changed.”
One thing that has changed is the cost of games, says McGregor. Once upon a time, operators could buy a pull-tab game from a licensed distributor for $20. Now many games cost more than $100, due to increasing printing costs (something magazine publishers are also familiar with).
Still, despite the increased prevalence of tribal casinos, sports betting, and whatever social media algorithm happens to be pulling customers to their cell phones, pull-tabs remain consistently popular, says McGregor.
Perhaps because they are part of the ambience and culture of the bars that offer them. “Pull-tabs is an old-school thing,” says Files. “If the dive bar has pull-tabs, it’s got an extra notch on its belt.”