Smoking ban nail in coffin for café

The landmark Bull Pen Café at the east end of Business Loop 70 is closing on March 31 after 57 years of operation, and owner Jackie Cockrell said the loss of customers after the smoking ban is largely to blame.

“There has been a series of things that knocked me back,” Cockrell said. “I don’t want to blame all of this on the smoking ban, but it hurt me big time.”

Regular customers stopped coming because they wanted to light up after breakfast and lunch, and Cockrell estimates that business dropped 50 percent.

Cockrell went to work at the café in 1978 after she graduated from high school and has owned the business for 17 years.

The Bull Pen had a hard time recovering from the shutdown of the Columbia Livestock Auction Barn five years ago, Cockrell said, and the subsequent reconstruction of the highway also hurt business.

Cockrell said she’s started looking for other jobs, and so have her four employees.

Several bars and restaurants in Columbia have reported significant declines in business since the smoking ban went into effect Jan. 9, including Otto’s at the corner of 8th and Walnut, the Tiger Den and another restaurant owned by a former waitress, Lucy’s Corner Café at 5th and Broadway streets.

Lucy Reddick is taking what she calls her second job to make ends meet.
Reddick said her breakfast and lunch trade has dropped by 20 percent since the ban. To make up for the loss, she said she’s been forced to start a 5 to 9 p.m. dinner service, Wednesday through Saturday. This is in addition to her 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. breakfast and lunch service six days a week. “It makes for a long day, she says, but you “gotta do what you gotta do to stay open.”

Lunch business has been hit particularly hard. “We’ve lost a lot of our regulars. We used to be full. Now we may have only five tables full in our back room,” she said. Saturday business has picked up with more families coming in, she said. Reddick developed a full dinner menu with appetizers, several entrées in the $9 price range and desserts. She is active in a petition drive to have the ban revoked and one of several business operators making adjustments—what she calls her Plan B—to maintain a smokeless customer base.