This beer bar will not serve you unless you give your shoes as collateral

Dulle Griet, a beer bar in Ghent, asks visitors who want to drink beer to hand over one of their shoes as collateral. The shoe is hung up in a special basket dangling close to the ceiling, and is returned to the owner when they’re ready to leave, Odditycentral.com reports.

Drinking beer in Belgium is such a big deal, and there are very beautiful custom-made glasses that customers find difficult to leave behind after drinking, so some of them steal the glasses.

Loss of glasses normally contribute a huge chunk to the bars’ expenditure as they are compelled to replace the stolen ones almost on a daily basis.

“Anyone who drinks our house beer must hand over their shoe. We then put them in a basket that we put up against the ceiling. The basket has now become an attraction, but for us it remains a guarantee. The glasses are quite expensive because we have them made especially for us,” Owner of Dulle Griet, Alex De Vriendt said.

Inasmuch as the weird measure may deter customers from stealing beer glasses, Alex De Vriendt said there are some others who prefer going home barefooted to leaving without a glass.

Interestingly, there is no means of first determining the value of the shoes customers give as collateral so as to figure out if they are worth the cost of the beer glasses.

Alex De Vriendt said: “We actually accept all kinds of shoes, but we realise that a flip-flop is not as valuable as the beer glass.”

Beer glass theft is such a troubling canker bars in Belgium grapple with. Last year a certain bar owner, Philip Maes invested about $5,000 into alarm systems for each individual beer glass to help detect glass thieves.

His hope was that the alarms would make noise if any customer intended to leave the bar with the glasses.

This beer bar will not serve you unless you give your shoes as collateral

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