Looking back at the World Cup: Fans drank Boston dry, got permanent tattoos, sold out famous BBQ joints, and drove up small business revenue

It became a running a joke for weeks. A city known for its more than lively and sometimes raucous nightlife somehow didn’t plan for the Tartan Army’s invasion of local taprooms. Several thousand miles away, a storied barbecue joint had to turn people away—not because they ran out of ribs, but because they ran out of the cups and utensils needed to serve those meats. Meanwhile, a tattoo parlor’s social media giveaway became a permanent souvenir for World Cup fans, from locals to foreign visitors now abroad.

The World Cup saw plenty of cross-cultural culinary diplomacy—foreigners and Americans alike who had never heard of yerba mate, for example, were now sharing gourds with friends—complete with social media posts about foreign visitors expressing excitement over the hospitality they received in this year’s host cities. As fans descended from around the world to support their home countries, they also stumbled into local small businesses, proving the real winner of the World Cup is Main Street, USA.

According to a Bank of America note, card spending spending at brick-and-mortar stores, restaurants and bars across the 11 U.S. host cities rose 5.3% year-over-year in the three weeks ending June 27, compared to 3.8% in the rest of the country. It’s a reversal from the prior three weeks, when host cities had trailed the rest of the country.

Los Angeles and New York were the clearest winners, tied to hosting Team USA group-stage matches and to a run of high-profile games. (New York also saw the Knicks’ championship run, which alone brought in at least $380 million to the city). On the other hand, Seattle barely moved in the data, but that’s because retail spending there was already running strong before the tournament began.

Between June 11 and June 21, the Samuel Adams Taproom in downtown Boston ran out of its flagship Boston Lager during the first weekend of Scotland’s group-stage matches. The location sold more than 7,000 pints of Boston Lager, emptied 99 kegs and two full tanks—the equivalent of another 30 kegs—and required five emergency deliveries to keep up.

“We were prepared for the influx of international visitors but could have never prepared for their preference for our flagship, Boston Lager, especially when we have 20 unique beers at the taproom,” said Devon Savage, manager of communications for the Samuel Adams brand. By the time the surge passed, the taproom had served roughly 10,000 pints total—about four times the volume it typically sees over a long holiday weekend like the Fourth of July.

“We thought we were prepared, and again, they just drank us dry,” she told UnHerd. “Who knew that would be such a fun thing to actually run out of beer.”

Savage described the relationship between staff and visiting fans, known collectively as the Tartan Army, as more than a sales bump. “They really are our friends,” she said. Staff ordered traffic cones—a nod to the Scottish tradition of wearing them as makeshift headwear during celebrations—and had fans sign them. The bar has now displayed roughly seven signed cones by the tournament’s end.

A few blocks away, the Glynn Hospitality Group—the family-owned company behind the Black Rose, Coogan’s, and Dylan’s—saw a comparable surge. Coogan’s, known for its $1 and $2 Bud Light drafts, went through more than 500 kegs of Bud Light in June alone; with more than 200 at Coogan’s and another 200-plus at the Black Rose.

“It was like having St. Patrick’s Day for like a week straight,” said Katie Freeman, a third-generation member of the family running the hospitality group. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They were super kind, fun. They were here to party and have a good time, but they did it in a way that was just like fun and respectful.”

Freeman told UnHerd the crowds skewed both international and local, with Coogan’s drawing large local crowds during Team USA matches. “We just felt that the Scots really brought a sense of like happiness, community, and fun,” she said. “And I think it kind of trickled down to the locals alike.”

Joe’s Kansas City Barbecue, a 30-year-old chain that grew out of a converted convenience store and competition-barbecue roots, is usually closed on Sundays. Expecting large crowds thanks to the World Cup, owners decided to open on Sundays. After receiving those large crowds, the owners then decided to give their employees a break, and go back to closing on Sundays.

But on the final Sunday Joe’s stayed open, the restaurant turned away hundreds of people already in line rather than risk cutting corners on quality. “The owner just opted that crew was more important than the dollars. It’s just more important to make sure we didn’t lose key crew members, that we weren’t overworking them,” Eric Tadda, the chain’s director of marketing, told UnHerd.

Joe’s used Kansas City Chiefs games and the Chiefs’ Super Bowl run as the closest benchmark, modeling a 20% to 25% increase in demand, which the tournament easily matched. While a typical weekend sees 300 to 320 slabs of ribs prepped per location, the World Cup topped 400 at each of the chain’s three restaurants. They even translated menus into Spanish and Dutch and equipped order stations with handheld translators, but they still were outpaced by hungry visitors.

“It’s the things you don’t think about, straws, silverware, how many times you change the trash,” Tadda said, although they were well prepared in terms of meat. “That Sunday, the last Sunday, we were pressing where we were running out of bread, running out of silverware, to-go silverware—like that’s again where we kind of knew this is getting to be too much.”

“I don’t think we’ve had anything like that for the length of six weeks,” he continued, adding that Joe’s began preparing months in advance, coordinating with the city and its distributors on staffing and supply, on the theory that every restaurant in town would be placing the same emergency orders at once. Despite the long lines that stretched well around the block, the crowds were “so passionate, but so patient, and so happy to be here.”

Across town, Café Corazón, a seven-time winner of Kansas City’s best small business award, scaled for cultural specificity instead of volume.

Argentinian owner Miel Castagna-Herrera spent a year planning how to meet a World Cup crowd. Sitting in a hotel-dense stretch of the Crossroads district near a cluster of Argentine-owned businesses, the café leaned into its existing yerba mate menu—a bitter, caffeinated South American tea—after Argentine journalists filmed segments there the week before Argentina’s opener. Those segments aired on Argentine television and drew visitors who recognized the café. “I saw you,” fans said before ordering.

“We’ve always had Americans trying [yerba mate] for the first time,” Castagna-Herrera told UnHerd, “but I think now that everyone sees Messi with his mate gourd, people who are not Argentinians are trying it more often.”

Sales at the Crossroads location rose 15% to 20% during the tournament, but were even higher at the café’s other two locations—complicated, she said, by a schedule spread across multiple cities that caused crowds to surge for a few days around a match, then disappear. “It’s been a strange organization of how they’re doing this World Cup,” she said.

Still, it’s been gratifying to see both Americans and foreigners try not only yerba mate, but even drinks Cafe Corazon made specifically for the teams that played in Kansas City. “It’s a mishmash, but then we made like a Tunisian coffee that they drink there, which is really fun.”

At Midnight & The Wicked, a cocktail lounge in Philadelphia, the World Cup collided with a separate policy change: Pennsylvania’s decision to let the city extend bar hours from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. for the tournament.

Owner Artem Ustayev said Philadelphia summers are normally the slowest stretch of his business, as clientele decamps for the Jersey Shore. “We fall off a cliff financially speaking,” he told UnHerd, recalling weeks last summer where the lounge did $30,000 in sales total—for that whole week.

Brazil’s group-stage match against Haiti upended that. Ustayev said the venue pulled in roughly $80,000 in sales that night alone, and close to $110,000 after taxes and tips. That would average some of his best weeks. “I would do a full week on that, and I did that in one night,” he said, calling it the busiest night in the bar’s history.

The lounge ran out of Corona a few times over the tournament, though Ustayev had stocked up on high-end liquor and champagne in advance. And, he added, extending hours to 4 a.m. didn’t translate into rowdier late nights, contrary to what state regulators had worried about. “That was not rooted in reality,” Ustayev said. Fans paced themselves rather than rushing to drink before an early close, he said, and staff saw no drop in tips despite the international crowd—something many worried about given how predominant tipping culture is in the U.S. “If anything, they’ve only seen an increase in their paychecks.”

And so has he. “I’m paying bills. Put it like that.”

On Vancouver’s Granville Street, closed to traffic and packed with fans throughout the tournament, Adrenaline Tattoos found a different kind of demand: fans who wanted something permanent to take home.

“Tattoos are just like the new souvenir,” said Mike Bilinsky, the shop’s operations manager. “Whenever people go somewhere, they want to permanently remember that trip, and that demographic of soccer fans is already tattooed to begin with.”

What began as a social media push—the parlor initially offered free tats to any Canadian national soccer team member—quickly became a new tourist attraction. While trademark restrictions kept requests away from FIFA’s own branding, fans chose things like flags, maple leafs, and soccer balls, plus a particularly popular design: a tattoo styled after a passport stamp.

At least half of the shop’s World Cup-related clientele were international visitors, said Bilinsky, who compared the atmosphere on the street to Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics. “Energy on the street,” he said. “Everyone’s just in a really good mood.”

“It’s something they’ll never lose,” Bilinsky said of the tattoos.