Sagebrush Cantina

The film of this night

The same simulated room and the same night, narrated. Every figure it speaks is one printed on this page, and the money is a range.

The figures, and where each one comes from

Spend per person, per hour: $16.00 MODELED — simulated simulated by us, not published by the venue
A full-menu cantina where much of the room is eating as well as drinking, so this is food-led rather than drink-led. Assumed, not sourced — nobody publishes it.

Hours: Mon–Thu 11:00–24:00, Fri 11:00–02:00, Sat 09:00–02:00, Sun 10:00–22:00 RECORD Published by Sagebrush Cantina

Capacity: 300 MODELED — simulated simulated by us, not published by the venue
Assumed, not sourced. The venue publishes no capacity, the Los Angeles County Fire Department occupancy load is not online, and the third-party listings disagree by an order of magnitude — so this is our figure, not theirs.

Floor area: 9,000 sq ft MODELED — simulated simulated by us, not published by the venue
Assumed, not sourced, and NOT worked out from the capacity above — it is a second assumption that happens to sit beside the first. Nothing about this building's area is published.

The trading week, as published

The room we simulate MODELED — simulated

Nobody from here has been inside this building. The floor below is our own construction: a rectangle of about the right area, with the bar, the rail and the furniture in the proportions of the one room this engine was actually built and measured against. It is the shape whose behaviour we understand, not the shape of this venue. Treat it as a sketch we can run, and nothing more.

Floor: 116 × 77 ft — simulated Bar: 64 ft — simulated Service points: 8 — simulated Walkable floor: 7795 sq ft — simulated

A night here, as we would simulate it MODELED — simulated

This is not a measurement of your bar. It is our guess at how a night here fills up, and the shaded band is how unsure we are: the line through the middle is a typical night, and the band is where most nights land. The band is wide because we are guessing when people arrive and how long they stay. Your own door counts are what make it narrow.

Notice that the room is fullest AFTER the busiest stretch at the door. That is not an error. People who came in during the rush are still here, so the crowd keeps building for a while after the queue outside has thinned — which is why counting heads at the door tells you where you were, not where you are.

The dashed line is how many people this bar can keep up with at that time of night. It moves during the evening because a room where everyone is settled in with a drink asks less of the bar than one where everyone is on their second.

How many people this bar can actually serve MODELED — simulated

This is the number the whole thing is for. Below it, another person through the door is worth money to you. Above it, the bar cannot keep up and the next person costs you — not because they do not buy anything, but because everyone already inside waits longer for theirs.

On a night like this one, our simulation says the room never gets past what the bar can serve. There is no crush to fix here — what limits this room is its size and its licence, not the speed of the service.

How these figures were arrived at

A night here has too much luck in it to work out with a formula, so we did it the other way round: we ran the whole night through thousands of times over, with people turning up at different moments on every run, and counted what happened each time. The range below is what came back — the busy nights and the quiet ones — rather than one number pretending to be certain. The method has a name: Monte Carlo.

What a night like that would take MODELED — simulated

These are simulated figures, not this venue's books. We have never seen their takings. What we have done is simulate the room from what is on the public record, assume what people spend, and add it up — so the number below is what our simulation earned, which is a different thing from what this bar earned.

The range is how much one simulated night differs from another — a quiet Tuesday against a busy one. It is NOT how unsure we are about the assumptions. If our guess at what people spend is wrong, every night in that range is wrong together and the range will not widen to warn you. That is the honest limit of this: the spread you see is the weather, not the map.

Our simulation also says the crowd costs this room money: when more people are in than the bar can serve, drinks that would have been poured are not. That is the gap below.

Assumed spend per person, per hour $16 per person per hour — simulated, assumed by us, not measured

Three things to hold against all of this

1. The line for how many people the bar can keep up with comes from ONE room we simulated in detail — the fictional cantina used elsewhere on this site — carried across to this venue as a ratio. It is exact for that one room and an estimate everywhere else, including here.
2. The pattern of when people arrive and how long they stay is not fitted to this venue. It is one of eight shapes we wrote for broad kinds of room, picked by hand for this one. Pattern used here: cantinaDay / cantinaWeekend / cantinaSunday
3. What people spend is assumed. It is the single number with the most influence on every figure on this page, and it is the one we have the least evidence for.

How this chart was made

The hours are the venue's own published trading times, linked above. Everything else on this chart is ours. We assume an arrival pattern and how long people stay, run the whole night one minute at a time carrying the crowd forward, and then run that night 240 times with different luck. The line is the middle night and the band holds the middle eight out of ten. Nobody publishes a bar's arrival curve, so there is nothing here to cite and nothing here that came from the venue.

There is no money on this chart on purpose. Turning occupancy into revenue needs a price and a spend rate we do not have for this venue, and a dollar figure built on two guesses stacked on each other would be worth less than the blank space.

What to be careful about

Capacity on this page is ASSUMED rather than sourced. It is the one public venue here for which that is true: the other three publish a figure and this one does not, so ours is a model and is labelled as one everywhere it appears.