For Terry Homer, customers are a precious commodity.

As commander of Mankato’s American Legion, Homer knows that those who stop coming can’t be replaced by boosting advertising or making menu changes. Sure, anyone can get buzzed in, but the club atmosphere makes it a relatively closed club.

“You want everyone to be healthy, but it’s (the smoking ban) putting a crimp into everything we do as service clubs,” he said.

Three months and change after Mankato’s smoking ban began on July 1, the story can be told most simply by separating the winners from the losers.

On one side are the service clubs and many — but not all — of the bars in Mankato that claim to have lost business. So far, 15 businesses have earned nine-month exemptions to the ban by proving a loss of 15 percent or more between July and September.

It would be easy to speculate the bars of North Mankato and other surrounding communities have benefited from the ban. The data from one local beer distributor show that Mankato’s former patrons have indeed crossed the river.

The beer story

If you drink Miller in Mankato or anywhere in the 10-county area, Tom Richards delivered your beer. He’s the Mankato branch manager of the Locher Bros., the sole distributor of a wide array of brands, Miller included, in this region.

When Richards discusses the sales records of his clients, he looks at what he calls the “trend change.”

Some bars and restaurants already are trending a certain way, regardless of the smoking ban. So when Richards calculates recent sales trends, he takes that into account.

If a bar, for example, faced steady declines of 2 percent before the ban but was up 6 percent afterward, Richards would say the trend change is 8 percent.

Mankato and North Mankato share an equal trend change in the “high single digits” since the ban began. The kicker, of course, is that Mankato’s beer sales are down that much while North Mankato’s have risen.

His numbers include 45 bars in Mankato and eight in North Mankato, so the effects are obviously unequal in total dollar amounts.

Richards, however, quickly cautions that he represents a little less than half of beer sales, which are themselves a little less than half of total alcohol sales. That means that his numbers account for less than a quarter of all alcohol sold.

In smaller towns around Mankato — Lake Crystal, Eagle Lake, Madison Lake, Nicollet, Good Thunder and Kasota — the trend of bars improved by about 5.5 percent over the past three months.