When Luke and Obi-Wan walk into the Mos Eisley Cantina in A New Hope, the first real line we hear isn’t about them at all. It’s the bartender snapping, “We don’t serve their kind here,” and kicking out R2-D2 and C-3PO.
On a planet full of smugglers, killers, and wanted criminals, the ones not welcome are the droids.
So why are they banned? And what is this scene really telling us about how the galaxy sees droids in the first place?
The Canon Answer Comes From Wuher Himself
This isn’t some official Imperial rule or Tatooine law. The real answer comes from the short story “We Don’t Serve Their Kind Here” in From a Certain Point of View: A New Hope.
There, we find out the droid ban is Wuher’s own house rule, shaped by what he went through before he ever worked that bar.
The cantina has a droid detector installed “for damn good reason,” and Wuher sticks to a simple line in his head: no droids, ever. It’s not really about business, crime, or the Hutts. It’s about a guy who survived a war, watched droids kill people he cared about, and decided he was never letting machines like that into his space again.
When R2-D2 and C-3PO walk into the cantina, Wuher’s mind snaps back to his teenage years on Arkax Station. He remembers running through the corridors while the whole place shook, power failing, blaster fire lighting up the dark behind him. Battle droids had cut the power and started executing everyone they found. His parents were among the bodies on the floor, shot and left smoldering.
When the droids moved through Arkax Station, Wuher stopped thinking of them as tools. They were the things that shot his parents and walked over their bodies like it was nothing. That’s what sticks with him. From then on, whenever he sees a droid, he’s not seeing a servant or a helper. He’s seeing the same kind of machine that cleared out his home during the Clone Wars — something built to follow orders and keep going long after any living soldier would be gone.
So when he sees a pair of droids roll into his bar years later, he isn’t thinking about customers or profit. He’s thinking about Arkax Station, about blasters in the dark, and about how close he came to dying at the hands of machines. Kicking the droids out isn’t just policy for him. It’s self-defense.
Why Wuher Believes Droids Are Too Dangerous to Trust
The story also shows us how Wuher thinks about droids on a deeper level. He doesn’t just dislike them; he outright hates them. As the narration puts it, “He hated droids. The Clone Wars taught him that. Clankers couldn’t be trusted.”
To him, droids are basically immortal. As long as their programming survives, they can keep coming back, and any machine with a processor could turn into a killer with the wrong command uplink. He doesn’t trust restraining bolts and he doesn’t trust owners.
In his mind, every droid is a walking reminder of what destroyed his family. That’s the real reason they aren’t allowed through his door.