Full of licenses and regulations doesn't mean that the licensing requirements for bars in particular are onerous.
An example is where I'm from, in Canada. Licensing for cars is easy. Business licenses are easy enough, if they're non-physical.
But opening a bar means at least $50k of licenses/compliance costs. To have a bar, you need to serve food. To serve food, there's minimum requirements for all sorts of things from electrical to ventilation to plumbing. So you need to apply to the city to do a study and plebiscite in the neighborhood to determine no one objects to your bar. You need to have an engineer sign off on your design and the fire department to sign off on that. Liquor license is $$$.
And that's before even bringing up the cost of the lease (1 year rent as deposit) or the actual construction costs (last I checked, over $400 per square foot).
An example is where I'm from, in Canada. Licensing for cars is easy. Business licenses are easy enough, if they're non-physical.
But opening a bar means at least $50k of licenses/compliance costs. To have a bar, you need to serve food. To serve food, there's minimum requirements for all sorts of things from electrical to ventilation to plumbing. So you need to apply to the city to do a study and plebiscite in the neighborhood to determine no one objects to your bar. You need to have an engineer sign off on your design and the fire department to sign off on that. Liquor license is $$$.
And that's before even bringing up the cost of the lease (1 year rent as deposit) or the actual construction costs (last I checked, over $400 per square foot).