What would you do to help the pub industry?

Is it all not part of a long term plan to lower alcohol consumption in this country and an attempt to phase out generations of piss heads and all the issues alcohol causes in society - health, mental health, pressure on the NHS, police forces etc and high prices in pubs/bars to keep all the "riff raff" out?

People who can't afford to drink out or refuse to pay the prices drink at home/mates houses, away from public places, lowering the risk of disturbance etc.
 
Pubs used to be a community focal point but since the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze it will never recover. The only thing happening round our way is shite student nights. In ye olde days you could buy suspect electrical goods and watch strippers at the same time. Now it's Sky Sports and bad karaoke ffs.
 
bladdered said:
I'm sure the pub snob group will hate this but simply follow the Wetherspoons model.

Provide reasonable prices for beer and grub and the punters will come.

My local charges £1.99 for Abbot Ale - £1.79 Mon-Wed. Cheaper than Tesco!

It's always got a good crowd in whilst the craft beer pubs around here charging a fiver a pint are dead.

It's not rocket science.
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Thats cheap, fucking hell !!
 
Worsleyweb said:
Young people really are getting more health conscious the world is changing, more pubs and bars will continue to go sadly.
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It’s not just that, they’ve changed what they consume.

That and underage drinking in pubs is non existent nowadays, which means a lot of 18 year olds don’t bother either if their mates who aren’t that yet can’t get a drink.

I’ve got a 20 year old son and an 18 year old daughter. Neither of them go to a pub anywhere near as much as I did at their age.

You are right that the culture has changed a lot too.
 
Kompany Car said:
You're kind of right, this only works if you are a freehouse, or even better a free hold, the problem is most are tied to breweries who control the price. Only 50% of pubs are free houses.

Forcing the corporate owners when they shut them, if they are not sold within 6 months, to sell to local resident groups at a market price for the building alone and not as a business might help. If more of the pubs were owned and run by communities it might help a bit with social cohesion. The government would need to prevent the pub chains imposing restrictive covenants on reopening as a pub following its sale, which they do to limit local competition.

You obviously have to play to your local market so the Spoons model might not be appropriate everywhere, but providing value for money whether thats at the more upmarket end or the lower end remains key. So no charging top notch prices for food I could make at home for a few quid.
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1. Junk the current system of rent appeals for pubs which heavily favours the freeholder owners and does not help publicans. Replace with completely independent tribunal with a requirement to recognise pub profits in decisions, not just a return for the freeholder.
Many tenanted pubs esp in the country remain shut because rents are too high. Local communities have in some cases raised the money to buy out the freehold, and become profitable which shows the problem.
2. Drink more.
 
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Everyone keeps saying the spoons model?
What that the bogs up twelve flights of stairs with young lads looking up girls skirts or hoping someone goes arse over tit coming back from bogs
 
Grassland Blue said:
My plan would be to tax the beer which is sold in supermarkets more highly than that sold in pubs. I would hope that that such a measure would discourage the drink at home brigade in favour of those going out for a pint or three.
Thoughts?
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More taxation is the answer to absolutely nothing.

I pay nearly 50% in tax when I earn it and another 20% when I spend it.
Enough with tax already.

If you want to change the balance then the action should be to reduce pub taxation - not increase it in shops!
 
meltonblue said:
It’s not just that, they’ve changed what they consume.

That and underage drinking in pubs is non existent nowadays, which means a lot of 18 year olds don’t bother either if their mates who aren’t that yet can’t get a drink.

I’ve got a 20 year old son and an 18 year old daughter. Neither of them go to a pub anywhere near as much as I did at their age.

You are right that the culture has changed a lot too.
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Not even underage drinking. It seems like every barman is an absolute jobsworth these days. My 35 year-old wife was genuinely not allowed to sit in a pub and drink a Diet Coke because the short-sighted barman had decided from across the room that she was under-18. With the best will in the world, she obviously looks in her 30s, but he’d made his mind up to challenge and couldn’t back down.

I’ve increasingly found that the UK has become more and more like America on this. When I was in uni, I would occasionally get IDed even though I looked pretty young. But it became stricter over time. The last time I got IDed, I was 32, and it probably would have been later, but I moved abroad.

In the case with my wife, we basically had to phone the people we were meeting to arrange to meet somewhere else, and the pub missed out on around 10 pints worth of sales, all because they're not allowed to use common sense these days and are taught to be ridiculously cautious.
 
bladdered said:
I'm sure the pub snob group will hate this but simply follow the Wetherspoons model.

Provide reasonable prices for beer and grub and the punters will come.

My local charges £1.99 for Abbot Ale - £1.79 Mon-Wed. Cheaper than Tesco!

It's always got a good crowd in whilst the craft beer pubs around here charging a fiver a pint are dead.

It's not rocket science.
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If you mean the real/craft ale mob, never met one who isn't happy to go in a spoons, in fact CAMRA used to give vouchers with membership for money off.

And most new craft bars are normally set up by younger people who think having 30 craft on keg trendy even though if they had sense they would limit it to 8-12 at most mix of Keg and Cask. so they could buy in bulk and get better prices to keep costs down to transfer to customers.

De-industrialisation was the biggest killer of pubs, most boozers died when the factories and local warehouse closed or were sold off.

another one of the biggest killers of pubs is rents and business tax cost unless you are a large brewery or chain you cannot absorb the costs as easily, but even then groups like Star don't like to and pass costs onto their landlords/managers who then have to charge high to make a profit.
 
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BlueMonkey79 said:
Believe it or not. Pubs make more of a profit margin on soft drinks than they do alcoholic ones.
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In percentage terms, yes. Not in absolute terms though. When I was pricing things for a restaurant, the lowest profit margin in percentage terms was champagne and the highest was Coke. But in absolute terms, the champagne obviously brought more profit.
 
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