Entrepreneurial Winnipeg

After smoking in public places was banned in 2004, happy hour crowds dwindled in bars across the province.

In a bid to woo customers back to his lounge, Ron Petryna, the owner of the Headingley Hotel, began running conventional Friday night bingo games.

"We started off giving away pretty tame stuff -- cases of pop or boxes of candy," Petryna says. Then he recalled a Ladies' Night promotion he'd witnessed south of the border -- one that climaxed with a few rounds of "naughty bingo" where female participants went home with vibrators and such.

"So we began to introduce adult toys into our own bingo games," says Petryna. "Next we added special martinis and cocktails named after the games. This all evolved from there."

"This all" refers to the fact that Manitoba has quietly become the undisputed erotic bingo capital of the world. Sure, you can find comparable goings-on in places like Toronto, Ont., Portland, Ore. and Orlando, Fla. But "dirty bingo" or "X-rated bingo" or however it's billed in those burgs isn't a standard occurrence. Not like it is at Dick's Dylan's, the Stock Exchange Hotel and the Riverside Inn, to name a few local nightspots that now host erotic bingo on a weekly basis.

This didn't exist when I lived in Winnipeg. In those days, Bingo was the exclusive domain of the bored elderly and others with ridiculously low opportunity costs of time. Whoever first recognized the potential market for the combination of Bingo and titillation should get the Kirzner award for the year. Entrepreneurial alertness extraordinaire.

HT: @CJSnowdon