Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank McCourt

The line lands like a rueful punchline, the kind McCourt can deliver because he’s already earned the right to be funny about hunger and bad luck. “They all went into the bar business” sounds, at first, like a modest immigrant success story: work hard, open a place, climb a rung. Then he snaps the trap shut with “Which was a mistake,” not moralizing, just reporting the obvious in the flat cadence of someone who’s watched ambition dissolve into drink.

McCourt’s intent is to show how proximity to temptation turns vice into routine. “Sip at the merchandise” is doing heavy lifting. It’s slyly commercial language for a self-destruction that’s both intimate and structural: alcohol isn’t merely a personal weakness, it’s literally inventory, always there, always justified. The phrase lets the men pretend it’s part of the job until the job becomes a pretext.

The subtext is communal damage. “It set them back, set us all back” widens the radius from the individual drinker to the family economy, the children’s chances, the whole fragile project of getting ahead. McCourt is diagnosing a cycle: businesses meant to stabilize a household become engines of instability when the product is escape.

Then the twist: “Well, them more than I.” It’s half self-exoneration, half confession. He’s separating himself from their wreckage while admitting he’s still marked by it. The irony is that his distance is also his inheritance: he survives, narrates, and turns the collateral damage into story.