As you can tell from the pictures (and maybe your personal experience) people reveal their personal problems to bartenders. According to one study, bartenders said 16 percent of customers routinely did so. But why?
“First of all, if your cocktail-serving confidant works somewhere you visit frequently, you probably don’t view them as a stranger,” Wendy L. Patrick, J.D., Ph.D., wrote in Psychology Today. “After all, bartenders are trained (and paid) to engage patrons. If you saddle up to their bar often, they remember what you order, and trust me, they also remember how you tip.”
But due to the hectic bar atmosphere, bartenders are actually less capable of addressing their patron’s personal problems as compared with other informal help-agents, such as beauticians and lawyers, who traditionally engage clients one-to-one. Bartenders, in contrast, are required to engage multiple customers simultaneously, at least if they want to make good tips.