https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/norm-from-cheers

Brian VanHooker tried to figure out the cost of Norm's tab on Cheers. So he contacted a former Cheers writer, a bartender from the real-life Cheers bar and Wendt, who charges $125 per Cameo.

A full article on that subject? wow. I can't believe this guy had nothing else to write about :)

But, in the end, we'll never know. There are way too many variables including all the times Norm wasn't there to drink beers (when he got a job as an accountant, when he went to Bora-Bora, when he boycotted Cheers to drink at ... err... Gary's?, etc.). I also agree that nobody in the world would accept such a huge tab seeing the binder with hundreds of pages.

This is a great article on Norm’s ever-increasing bar tab at “Cheers.” As we never saw Owen Marshall discuss legal fees with his clients on “Owen Marshall: Counsellor At Law,” we never saw Norm or anyone else actually paying for their drinks at “Cheers.”

Another thing we never saw was how much and how often Sam Malone and the other bartenders were tipped by the customers at the “Cheers” bar. My younger brother attended
college in Boston and later lived there. One summer evening, while enjoying drinks at a bar on the New Jersey shore, my brother noticed how most of the customers there would routinely tell the bartender to keep the change from the three dollars they gave the guy or woman for a $2.50 drink. “In New England, a bartender has to EARN his or her tip,” he told
me. If a bartender gave “kick-backs” to the customers, they would reciprocate with a good tip at the end of the evening, presumably.

I guess drinkers were more generous with their tips in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area than in the “Yankee” states to the north.

In fact, I believe their have been studies done on how generous (or cheap) bar customers are in various sections of the country. I wonder if the customers at “Archie Bunker’s Place” in Queens, NY were more generous than the customers at “Cheers” in Boston, MA?

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/norm-from-cheers

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Obviously, the first thing I did when trying to discern Norm’s tab was Google it. Perhaps some diligent redditor had done the calculations, or some collegiate mathematician had published their dissertation on the subject online. I found a few noble attempts, but none had the scientific rigor to satisfy me. For example, a forum post from 2003 reasonably assumed Norm had 11 beers a day, every day, for 37 years (from 1966 — when Norm reached drinking age — to 2003). However, it assumed the price of beer was $2 for all of those years, regardless of inflation or brand, and it failed to account for specific shifts in Norm’s tab that occur in the series. Because of this, I concluded that their total of $260,149.22 was insufficient. Another post put the number at $32,032 (https://redirect.viglink.com/?format=go&jsonp=vglnk_165250221253913&key=c7da82fd9416e8a876a73341c6cfdc1e&libId=l35d34zb0103gjx7000DLk5cte6nt&loc=https%3A%2F%2Fmelmagazine.com%2Fen-us%2Fstory%2Fnorm-from-cheers&ccpaConsent=1YN-&v=1&out=https%3A%2F%2Farchinfos.com%2Flibrary%2Flecture%2Fread%2F95893-what-was-norms-bar-tab-on-cheers&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fmelmagazine.com%2Fentertainment&title=How%20Much%20Was%20Norm%E2%80%99s%20Tab%20on%20%E2%80%98Cheers%E2%80%99%3F&txt=%2432%2C032), but offered no reasoning as to why. Yet another claimed (https://redirect.viglink.com/?format=go&jsonp=vglnk_165250219803312&key=c7da82fd9416e8a876a73341c6cfdc1e&libId=l35d34zb0103gjx7000DLk5cte6nt&loc=https%3A%2F%2Fmelmagazine.com%2Fen-us%2Fstory%2Fnorm-from-cheers&ccpaConsent=1YN-&v=1&out=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sitcomsonline.com%2Fboards%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D58449&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fmelmagazine.com%2Fentertainment&title=How%20Much%20Was%20Norm%E2%80%99s%20Tab%20on%20%E2%80%98Cheers%E2%80%99%3F&txt=claimed), “They say once on Letterman the actual number, but I forgot. I think it was like $360,000 or somethin’.” Of course, I found nothing on Google to support the idea that such an event occurred on any of David Letterman’s talk shows.