The speaker is a bartender watching a late-night crowd settle into its groups: the attractive people with each other, the drunks with the drunks, and the speaker alone in the middle. Even the glasses on the bar become a kind of lineup of company, as if choosing one were choosing who to spend the night with. That small joke hints at real loneliness.
The tone is dry and self-mocking. The speaker admits that people who work in bars like to believe they have something bigger going on, then undercuts that idea by calling it a bad habit mistaken for a hobby. Even a degree, the poem says, would be a better way to waste time. The last lines are the bleakest and funniest: one bottle left in the fridge, and a whole community pulling together to finish it. The mood is tired, wry, and quietly sad, with no big drama, just the low hum of a night that goes nowhere.