Toonie bars?

I don't care about cash/toonie bars, typically. But if you're already buying the alcohol, I just find it a little (a lot) in poor taste to basically ask your guests to be reimbursed for it.

If the venue was hosting the toonie bar and no money changed through your hands, other than you paying them, then whatever. But you're going to profit off your guests. That would be like me hosting a NYE party and charging my friends for each glass of wine from the bottles I bought.

I've never heard of a toonie bar before and have never been to a wedding with a cash bar before and we had an open bar because we couldn't imagine charging our guests any money for drinks.

With that being said, I was thinking the same thing as SunshineJenn. I don't understand buying your own alcohol and then charging guests any amount. A few years ago Hubby was best man in his best friend's wedding in Dallas. Their venue had a bartender, they just had to supply their own alcohol and the day before, the groom went out with Hubby and bought the beers, and I went with the bride-to-be and she bought wines and some of the hard liquor. They didn't charge their guests anything to drink.

Bottom line: You're most likely going to do what you want to do anyway, so a lot of these opinions, whether in your favor or not, really don't matter. Good luck

I don't think it is close minded to believe in treating your guests as guests and not as ATMs to recoup some sort of financial loss you are encountering from holding a wedding.

And for my comment, I'm sorry that you think it's snarky when in fact it is exactly what you are doing except with food and not alcohol.

I also don't get the logistics of selling tickets. That means someone at your reception has to be in charge of selling tickets all night, right? And then people would have to continually go up to him or her during the reception to buy more tickets? That person wouldn't get to enjoy the reception!

My wedding will be like the one in Nay's post--we stock our own bar. My cousin works for a wine distributor and he's getting me all the wine at cost. We're just going to start buying cases of beer when they go on sale closer to the wedding date. Same thing with liquor. It's saving us literally thousands of dollars--I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to compensate us for that. But my family would mutiny if there were any type of cash bar, so that's where I'm coming from.

This sounds like a cultural canadian thing. I never in my life thought I would be referring to cultural canadian stuff and now knowing this, it's kinda awesome.

People would be really shocked to find out how different weddings are in other cultures. Some europeans are directed to give an exact set amount per guest as a gift, for instance. That would be mortifying here in the states. It is what it is.