For Sale: The Only Bar in a 14-Person Montana Town

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cool-bar-montana

by objections • 7 years ago

96 89 7 years ago

atlasobscura.com

m23khan• 7 years ago

well, for sure the owner would have town's monopoly in the bar business.

alexis_fr• 7 years ago

Monopoly? So... do we need to split up the bar, for a fair market?

gbear605• 7 years ago

The problem is not a monopoly, but abuse of a monopoly in a way that stops competition. If the bar owner started charging $100/beer and then forcefully stopped anyone else from opening a bar, that’d need to be broken up for a fair market. Short of that, you don’t have an issue

Isamu• 7 years ago

Do they accept REMOTE employees?

kempbellt3• 7 years ago

If you move there to run the bar, you'd be in a remote town and therefore I think "REMOTE employee" would be an apt title. So... yes?

mc32• 7 years ago

It would be fun if the bar is run by remote controlled robots, serving you beer at 10pm - maybe someone who just work up the other side of the world is controlling the robot!

Mikeb852• 7 years ago

Asking price seems rather high. I'm sure you could find an abandoned building in Montana and turn it into a bar for far less than $225k.

edf13• 7 years ago

Your paying for the business + history

stevehawk• 7 years ago

I gotta assume in this case you're more paying for the history.. can't imagine there's as lot of business with 13 residents and nearest city being 45 minutes away.

Mikeb852• 7 years ago

History doesn't pay the bills when you're in the middle of nowhere. Also, I'm sure all the other abandoned buildings around here have stories.

kempbellt3• 7 years ago

Not really. You'd really just be paying for the history.

Spending a quarter million dollars on a four wood (edit: brick) walls and a door in a podunk Montana town that is about a 100 mile drive to the nearest town isn't a business purchase. You likely wouldn't recoup the cost in your lifetime.

ewhanley4• 7 years ago

In Montana, you're paying for the liquor license. It's not uncommon to see hole-in-the-wall bars in 2000 person towns go for $1 million. They are quota-ed and similar to the NYC taxi medallion system.

gist• 7 years ago

Hmm. Well perhaps the price could have to do with the liquor license and the fact that that license could be used in another location?

I don't know that is the case here but that thought comes to mind. Could be geographic restrictions (county) but maybe not. County is about 9500 people.

http://www.mtrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?RN=42%2E12%2E209

undersuit• 7 years ago

Liquor licenses are definitely scarce. I remember hearing one for Missoula, MT being sold for $750K. It's also a huge issue for the brewery/winery/distillery market. Old entrenched interests don't like our breweries taking their customers even if they close before 8PM.

allthecybers• 7 years ago

Hopefully all those 14 patrons are loyal and healthy and plan to continue frequenting the establishment.

trhway• 7 years ago

as if they had plethora of other entertainment options to choose from ...

brudgers• 7 years ago

Montana is not particularly inexpensive. A lot of wealth there living outside a spotlight. Note how well kept the bar interior appears in the photos.

SmellyGeekBoy• 7 years ago

This sounds like the bar equivalent of the "I could build Twitter in my basement in a weekend" trope that HN is so fond of.

JoeAltmaier• 7 years ago

Perfect place for witness protection gig?

mc32• 7 years ago

Or for someone who broke bad a little too much.

socrates19984• 7 years ago

This place isn't just in the middle of nowhere, it's in Eastern Montana, not even the nice part of Montana (the west).

This place shouldn't exist. A mildly interesting story, but small town Montana is a rough existence even if you live in pretty part.

I would not recommend anyone buying this place unless you don't mind throwing away $200k on it.

Edit: All the down votes are coming from people who have never been to Eastern Montana. I have. Multiple times. I lived in Montana. Eastern Montana has nice, polite people, but it's got almost nothing going for it economically other than oil.

There is a reason why people (especially young people) are leaving Eastern Montana for the past several decades.

rb808• 7 years ago

You're not joking, I checked streetview and its one of the few places I've seen in the developed world where the streetview car didn't bother leaving main street and just GTFO.

Edit: hey sorry if I come across as offensive, I'm from a small city and like living in quiet places.

pmilot• 7 years ago

I wonder just how strange and alien most locals would find the above comment about their town.

Not trying to be offensive here, I just find the thought of using Google Street View coverage as any kind of metric for such a place so... jarring.

dang3• 7 years ago

Please don't cross into regional slurs. "This place shouldn't exist" is a step into that, and we need users not to go there here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

socrates19984• 7 years ago

I was born in Montana. I lived in Montana. That restaurant probably hasn't made a profit in 30 years and they are asking $250k for it.

MS904• 7 years ago

Yep, once you get East of the Rockies there's really not much to see or do until you get to like...Minnesota.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that Montana has the highest suicide rate in the country.

ewhanley4• 7 years ago

It's about 60 miles east of the last tiny town discussed on HN [0]. Ingomar isn't _really_ much of a town, but it is a cultural waypoint. It's surrounded by historic farming/ranching communities and is within 50-60 miles of several more populous small towns. Driving 50-60 miles is a trivial venture in MT. When I was a kid growing up nearby, there were rodeos in Ingomar nearly every weekend during the summer. They pulled in a decent number of visitors (probably 100-200 or so), and the Jersey Lilly was, naturally, the busiest place in town. I believe they are still putting on the rodeos. It's not a huge amount of business, but probably enough to support a $200k price tag if you're looking for an unusual hobby/lifestyle in an area with a lot of western history. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21569610

dxemy• 7 years ago

Reminds me of this little piece of news from today. They are selling a small Spanish village using Wallapop, which is an app that could be considered a local version of Craigslist. The price: €90M

https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20191209/472142739583/vent...

ctdonath• 7 years ago

With the onset of Starlink, I expect such locations could experience a population boom. With urban housing prices skyrocketing (demand exceeding supply = bidding war), many are discovering the only thing they need to live where they actually want to is reliable high-speed low-latency internet. The land is cheap ($150,000 for 321 acres in Ingomar, Montana), the region attractive (drove around there this summer, very nice), just need a good data feed. Leverage it right, and that old bar could spawn a happenin' site for remote workers.

MS904• 7 years ago

Not in Eastern Montana, I don't think. It's a pretty depressing place to live. All the mountains and beautiful wilderness that come to mind when you think of Montana are about 300 miles west. All that's really out in the east is flat grassland, meth, and Indian reservations.

The state has the highest suicide rate in the nation.

dobleboble• 7 years ago

Go back during winter and see if you feel the same way XD

planteen2• 7 years ago

Right this minute you could find very fast internet (fiber) in rural areas with very inexpensive housing. I have a relatives in the Dakotas & Nebraska with better internet than I have in Denver. Some of them live in town and some of them live in the country. A lot of it seems to depend on local government having the drive to get rural access funds from the FCC.

As another said, eastern Montana could be brutal if its not something you are used to. There are extremely hot and extremely cold days (in the -30s degrees F) possible. It will be really windy and really brown (its very dry) for much of the year. You might also be shocked by how much some people drink/use other substances and how they get around when incapacitated. (There is no Lyft/Uber). There will not be a lot of young singles around, either.

I personally don't think there will be a big boom because of Starlink for housing. At the end of the day, internet is just a small factor in what makes a place desirable to live. Climate, distance to city/airport, local bars & restaurants, scenic beauty, and local activities all factor a lot, too.

at-fates-hands• 7 years ago

It will be really windy and really brown (its very dry) for much of the year.

Remember playing soccer with a guy from Montana. We were playing on a field in the Fall that was basically all dead, yellow grass. He used to say. "Dude, I'm from Montana, this is considered LUSH"

threwawasy1228• 7 years ago

I think the bigger problem is getting more companies to allow fully remote employees, internet connectivity is only a small part of the issue.

OnlineGladiator2• 7 years ago

I think people care about food more than they care about internet. There are small towns that can't even keep grocery stores running (there was an article about it on HN recently).

randomdata• 7 years ago

While not Montana, I can get gigabit internet service [~10-30ms latency to Google servers] on my farm. I like it here, but I don't see the masses flocking to live here because of the internet service.

AdrianB1• 7 years ago

What are the taxes to live in this area? A colleague has a small farm in West Virginia and she told me she pays about half of her net income in taxes for the farm. I think she earns around $60,000.

beart• 7 years ago

I took a trip to Eastern Montana, to a 'town' of about 20 people. Turned out the local pastor was from my home town 5 states away.

It's such a different way of living - and difficult to imagine without actually going there and experiencing it.

pgrote• 7 years ago

I've always wondered about the data missing in Google Maps. For instance, when you go to Ingomar, MT and look at street view, the car got to the entrance of the town and the data just stops.

https://goo.gl/maps/WVTAChPsBUiRjnoX9

Did the camera die? Did the car get a flat? Did someone forget to turn something on?

Twixes• 7 years ago

It was them.

ben1743• 7 years ago

Maybe they stopped at the bar and got inebriated and forgot to complete their mission :)

OnlineGladiator2• 7 years ago

Slightly related, I was surprised to learn how much Google still relies on satellite data for mapping roads. I found a road (pretty isolated, but there were occupied houses on it) less than an hour from Mountain View that, according to Google Maps, didn't exist (it just ended in front of the woods according to Google - I went for a few miles before Google was able to locate me on a road again).

I'm not surprised this is their approach; I am surprised that this many years later a street so close to their headquarters could still be invisible to them.

DubiousPusher3• 7 years ago

A weird thing about the of rural Montana that I grew up in is that Google maps has names of places that no one there uses and then they don't have names that are popularly known.

casefields2• 7 years ago

Holy cow is that area desolate. Gotta take a special type of person to want to pony up and buy this place.

ben1743• 7 years ago

Looks like it also comes with a sweet little penthouse: http://www.jerseylillysaloon.com/whiskey-row-penthouse.html

ben1743• 7 years ago

My bad, can't edit the above comment but I seem to have mistaken it for another saloon in Arizona.

RickJWagner• 7 years ago

I'd be afraid my best customers would be alcoholics and I'd feel guilty in running them off.

It'd be hard to earn a living off 13 other people.

Vysero• 7 years ago

Wow, I have lived here in Montana for 33 years and I have never heard of Ingomar. Don't let the article fool you. There are probably at least 100-200 other similar bars for around the same price in towns which are relatively close to the same size.

mitchty2• 7 years ago

I grew up in North Dakota, this bar sounds like a lot of small town bars I grew up around. I'm sure you're right on them being a dime a dozen, our "local" aka 20 minute drive away bar had unpaved roads and also yes did have spots for the horses.

vonnik• 7 years ago

Native Montanan speaking here. I think the Montana equivalent to YC's "build something people want" is "build bars where people live." To do the opposite makes for a lot of slow afternoons.

wanderer2323• 7 years ago

"Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot sign reading: 'All Drinks One Dollar.' Andy sits on the safe in his neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies. The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.

"Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn't any. The citizens saw that we had 'em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.

(The Octopus Marooned by O. Henry)

DubiousPusher3• 7 years ago

For real, buying this kind of business in Montana is extremely risky. I lived for many years in an area that's very popular with tourist/sportsmen including quite a few famous Hollywood types. There are many lakes with lodges around there. My family got to know many people who would by a place like that and it ruined many of their lives. Divorces, bankruptcies, the whole gamut. It's very hard.

casefields2• 7 years ago

These always look like fun, interesting deals to outsiders but unless you have someone with local knowledge, I wouldn’t trust any of them.

client4• 7 years ago

Montana has some odd liquor laws, so that's likely the largest reason for the price. There's a quota system in incorporated cities and counties, meaning supply doesn't hit demand inflating prices. The system should be done away with, but alas.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 7 years ago

If this tickles your fancy, there are plenty of Australian outback pubs on the market for similar prices:

https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/news/six-classic-aus...

For Sale: The Only Bar in a 14-Person Montana Town

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