Nelson end of an era

[Alway Swilby]

1 hour ago, Victor Vectis said:

Or Watney's Red Barrel, Titbread Wankard (the keg version) or Double Diamond.

 

Ahhhhh................the good old days

 

(Not!)

You've also neglected Watney's Special.... what a beer. Mind you it was only 25p a pint.

[Cheshire cat]

What about brew ten or brew eleven. How many chances do they need to get it right

If Everards have taken over the Admoiral hopefully it will be at least as good as the Swan at Fradley which is one of theirs

[BruceinSanity]

Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.
 

Hilaire Belloc, 1955

[rowland al]

6 hours ago, Cheshire cat said:

What about brew ten or brew eleven. How many chances do they need to get it right

If Everards have taken over the Admoiral hopefully it will be at least as good as the Swan at Fradley which is one of theirs

As is the Barley Mow at Cosgrove. Also seems another busy Everards pub. 

 

Sunchaser, mmmm. 

[Gareth E]

The reason many pubs fail is that they have high fixed costs and fail to attract enough customers. The main reason that they fail to attract enough customers is that their prices are too high for much of the population. They rely on the affluent proportion of the population to be their customer base.

 

A £7 Thai meal was referred to earlier, the implication that this was cheap, and the place was busy. Although cheap the variable costs (food ingredients) will only be around £1, this leaves a £6 contribution towards the fixed costs of the business. Providing that the normal level of staff can cope with a busy workload there will be no additional costs associated with producing more meals, other than the cost of the ingredients.

 

If the meal was sold at £10 the contribution towards fixed costs would be greater, but the place would very likely also be quieter. This is of course the great dilemma business owners face, there is no right or wrong approach. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that it's often better to build up a customer base by offering competitive pricing and offering a quality product, rather than offering a quality product at a relatively high price. It's my view that less businesses in this sector would fail if they took this approach. Yes you can be a busy fool, but once you've built a regular customer base there's the possibility of edging up your pricing slightly, without overkill.

 

Some people don't care how much a meal costs, but the vast majority of people do.      

[rowland al]

There are lots of reasons why pubs are struggling. It takes very smart management to keep one going. According to Google, more than 10,000 pubs have closed down since 2000. 

 

Many are sold off to be redeveloped into private properties. It’s a quick way for a brewery to profit from a failing business.

 

It is mainly supply and demand in the end. I think more and more people are too busy doing other stuff at home these days (like socialising on the internet instead of meeting in a pub!).

 

Food and booze is much cheaper in supermarkets. Home cooking has taken off due to being swamped with cooking programs on TV. Take away’s are booming. 

 

Same as the canals really, use it or lose it. 

[Laurie Booth]

16 hours ago, Sea Dog said:

I don't want to diss your Grandad, but he obviously never tried a pint of Star Light in Plymouth in the 70s!

 

 

Watney's Red Barrel comes to mind.

[Athy]

12 minutes ago, rowland al said:

There are lots of reasons why pubs are struggling. It takes very smart management to keep one going. According to Google, more than 10,000 pubs have closed down since 2000. 

 

Many are sold off to be redeveloped into private properties. It’s a quick way for a brewery to profit from a failing business.

 

It is mainly supply and demand in the end. I think more and more people are too busy doing other stuff at home these days (like socialising on the internet instead of meeting in a pub!).

 

Food and booze is much cheaper in supermarkets. Home cooking has taken off due to being swamped with cooking programs on TV. Take away’s are booming. 

 

 

Much of this makes sense, save your last line. Think back (if you go back that far) to the 1960s:

- Food and drinks were much cheaper in supermarkets (which were proliferating by the end of that decade) than in a pub or restaurant.

- Home cooking was the norm for most people, and there were popular cooking programmes hosted by, inter alia, Philip Harben and Fanny Craddock.

- Take-aways were booming. Most of them were called fish & chip shops, and queues outside them were the norm at certain times of day.

 

It's hard to believe that the internet is solely responsible for the decline in pub-going: after all, trendies can take their little hand-held computers to the pub with them if they wish.

 

So, why are pubs closing down? I think increased overheads must be the principal culprit.

[rowland al]

2 minutes ago, Athy said:

Much of this makes sense, save your last line. Think back (if you go back that far) to the 1960s:

- Food and drinks were much cheaper in supermarkets (which were proliferating by the end of that decade) than in a pub or restaurant.

- Home cooking was the norm for most people, and there were popular cooking programmes hosted by, inter alia, Philip Harben and Fanny Craddock.

- Take-aways were booming. Most of them were called fish & chip shops, and queues outside them were the norm at certain times of day.

 

It's hard to believe that the internet is solely responsible for the decline in pub-going: after all, trendies can take their little hand-held computers to the pub with them if they wish.

 

So, why are pubs closing down? I think increased overheads must be the principal culprit.

I never said the internet was ‘solely’ responsible, but I think it is the biggest factor. For starters, we choose whether to see our mates down the pub or use facebook from home. We didn’t have facebook back in the ‘old days’. 

 

It’s easy to blame overheads and poor management, but ultimately it’s OUR choice whether we want to use it, or lose it.  Some pubs are still thriving for this reason (and because there is less choice now so many other pubs have closed down).

 

Yes, there are some badly run pubs but when I used to frequent a local regularly, we used to feed our views back to the landlord, not moan about it on internet forums. Trip Advisor is all well and good, but open to abuse because it’s too easy  to complain on line than confront the landlord directly. 

 

[WotEver]

9 minutes ago, Athy said:

So, why are pubs closing down?

The three main reasons in my opinion are the smoking ban, a far different attitude towards drink-driving, and corporate greed. 

 

A pub used used to be a place to relax with a few ciggies and a pint or three. Banning smoking, regardless of whether or not the pub had effective air cleaners, made it an uncomfortable experience for smokers. Smoking shelters by law had to be draughty outdoor spaces, making ‘having a fag’ an unpleasant experience. Many folk have since stopped smoking which is of course a good thing, but it’s nevertheless resulted in one of the ‘pleasures’ of going to the pub disappearing. 

 

Drink-driving has (obviously) always been a bad thing, but going back a few years it wasn’t unheard of to overhear someone saying “I don’t know how I got home last night, I wasn’t seeing two white lines, I was seeing three!”  That would have been met with knowing nods of the head as many of the listeners identified with the speaker. These days nobody would dare admit that they’d driven after two pints - so you either have to have a designated driver (not much fun for him) or take a taxi (expensive if the pub is far away). 

 

Most pubs are tied to the brewery unless they are a free house. They therefore have to buy their beer from the brewery. Why then does it cost 50% more for the tenant to purchase his beer directly from the brewery than he would pay at a wholesalers? How is that fair?  Corporate greed in action. 

 

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting that pubs should become smoke-filled dens full of drunks who are about to get behind the wheel of a car, I’m simply pointing out what, in my opinion, has changed. Tony Blair’s ‘Cafe Culture’ forced onto a country that has an entirely different tradition. 

 

I await to be shot down in flames. 

[MtB]

9 minutes ago, WotEver said:

The three main reasons in my opinion are the smoking ban, a far different attitude towards drink-driving, and corporate greed. 

 

A pub used used to be a place to relax with a few ciggies and a pint or three. Banning smoking, regardless of whether or not the pub had effective air cleaners, made it an uncomfortable experience for smokers. Smoking shelters by law had to be draughty outdoor spaces, making ‘having a fag’ an unpleasant experience. Many folk have since stopped smoking which is of course a good thing, but it’s nevertheless resulted in one of the ‘pleasures’ of going to the pub disappearing. 

 

Drink-driving has (obviously) always been a bad thing, but going back a few years it wasn’t unheard of to overhear someone saying “I don’t know how I got home last night, I wasn’t seeing two white lines, I was seeing three!”  That would have been met with knowing nods of the head as many of the listeners identified with the speaker. These days nobody would dare admit that they’d driven after two pints - so you either have to have a designated driver (not much fun for him) or take a taxi (expensive if the pub is far away). 

 

Most pubs are tied to the brewery unless they are a free house. They therefore have to buy their beer from the brewery. Why then does it cost 50% more for the tenant to purchase his beer directly from the brewery than he would pay at a wholesalers? How is that fair?  Corporate greed in action. 

 

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting that pubs should become smoke-filled dens full of drunks who are about to get behind the wheel of a car, I’m simply pointing out what, in my opinion, has changed. Tony Blair’s ‘Cafe Culture’ forced onto a country that has an entirely different tradition. 

 

I await to be shot down in flames. 

 

I think your analysis is spot on, but you overlooked one further factor.

 

A pub building is often worth two or three times its value as a pub. Planning rules fortunately make it difficult to change a pub building into a private residence or virtually all of them would close down overnight. Unfortunately though, there is a loophole where a pub which is a failing business as a pub CAN get change of use. This means there is a massive incentive for otherwise viable pubs to be driven into the ground as businesses deliberately, in order to get the £500k uplift in value if the planners can be convinced the pub could not be made 'viable'.  

[Athy]

14 minutes ago, WotEver said:

 

 

Most pubs are tied to the brewery unless they are a free house. They therefore have to buy their beer from the brewery.

Far less common than hitherto. A piece of legislation some years ago (early noughties?) limited the number of tied houses which a brewery could own, with the aim of curbing monopolies. Of course the brewers, not being stupid, found ways round it: Whitbread, for example, stopped brewing altogether (Hurrah! I hear some people shout) and put their money into Costa cafés and Premier hotels. Others sold many of their former tied houses to pub management companies ("Pubcos", which I still think would benefit from an "e"). So, at least in theory, landlords have more choice of what beer to stock and where to buy it. In practice, I'm not so sure.

[rowland al]

3 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I think your analysis is spot on, but you overlooked one further factor.

 

A pub building is often worth two or three times its value as a pub. Planning rules fortunately make it difficult to change a pub building into a private residence or virtually all of them would close down overnight. Unfortunately though, there is a loophole where a pub which is a failing business as a pub CAN get change of use. This means there is a massive incentive for otherwise viable pubs to be driven into the ground as businesses deliberately, in order to get the £500k uplift in value if the planners can be convinced the pub could not be made 'viable'.  

Yes, and being more cynical, I wonder whether that’s why some breweries take money off some naive newbie publicans then watch it run down.

 

Greed is certainly a factor.

 

As a non smoker, I never really understood the smoking ban when they could have just had smoking/non-smoking bars/pubs. 

 

[MtB]

3 minutes ago, Athy said:

with the aim of curbing monopolies.

 

 

This puts me in mind of the question the late great Screaming Lord Such used to ask from time to time:

 

"Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?"

 

 

[Athy]

2 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

 

This puts me in mind of the question the late great Screaming Lord Such used to ask from time to time:

 

"Why is there only one Monopolies Commission?"

 

 

Quite so, though I didn't know it originated from him.

But if I had used the singular, people might infer that restrictions were being applied to popular board games.

[alan_fincher]

26 minutes ago, WotEver said:

The three main reasons in my opinion are the smoking ban, a far different attitude towards drink-driving, and corporate greed. 

 

A pub used used to be a place to relax with a few ciggies and a pint or three. Banning smoking, regardless of whether or not the pub had effective air cleaners, made it an uncomfortable experience for smokers. Smoking shelters by law had to be draughty outdoor spaces, making ‘having a fag’ an unpleasant experience. Many folk have since stopped smoking which is of course a good thing, but it’s nevertheless resulted in one of the ‘pleasures’ of going to the pub disappearing.

 

Of course the counter to that is that if you actually tended to avoid pubs because of the cigarette smoke laden atmosphere, you are far more likely to want to go there following the ban.

Even as a former smoker, (many years ago now), I am far more inclined to spend significant time in pubs, (and in particular to have a meal in one), than I was when smoking was the norm.

It may have upset the smokers, but for the non smokers its the best thing to ever happen to pubs, (and restaurants and other public places).

[MtB]

14 minutes ago, rowland al said:

Yes, and being more cynical, I wonder whether that’s why some breweries take money off some naive newbie publicans then watch it run down.

 

 

No that is nothing to do with intending to eventually close the pub and turn it into a residence. For a big pubco that would be killing the golden goose.

 

The big pubcos appear brutally avaricious to me, from the stories one reads repeatedly. They have realised there is an endless supply of naive newbies with piles of cash dreaming of running their own pub, and willing to shell out to get one. They take a lease on an empty pub paying a substantial premium, splurge the rest of their money on doing it up then open the doors for business. If they fail, then that's too bad, the pubco gets their pub back and keeps the premium and are free to do the same again. If  they do well, the pub co keeps raising their rent to skim off the profit until the point is reached when the business is not viable, the LL goes bust and again they get their pub back. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. This seems to be the standard business model for the big pubcos to me. 

Edited November 3, 2018 by Mike the Boilerman
Add a bit.

[Laurie Booth]

1 hour ago, Athy said:

So, why are pubs closing down? I think increased overheads must be the principal culprit.

I think it is the smoking ban and drink driving.

[MtB]

3 minutes ago, Laurie.Booth said:

I think it is the smoking ban and drink driving.

 

And swingeing business rates.

 

You can't just run a quiet sleepy pub any more with two old codgers buying a pint every three hours, even if you own the building outright. The high fixed overheads comprising primarily business rates prevent it, I suspect. 

 

[dmr]

20 minutes ago, rowland al said:

Yes, and being more cynical, I wonder whether that’s why some breweries take money off some naive newbie publicans then watch it run down.

 

Greed is certainly a factor.

 

As a non smoker, I never really understood the smoking ban when they could have just had smoking/non-smoking bars/pubs. 

 

I think there is usually a big distinction between brewery owned pubs and the new evil pubcos.  A brewery was in the business of making and selling beer and so it was in their interest for the pubs to survive. I note that the new larger and more successful micro-breweries now try to acquire a little chain of pubs to support their brewing.  The Pubcos are essentially property and investment companies with no financial interest in beer, they just buy it in and sell it on at a profit...their aim is to make money from their "property portfolio" in any way that they can.  Actually some of them have zero involvement with the pub business and subtract all of this to a middleman company.

 

...............Dave

[Laurie Booth]

2 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

And swingeing business rates.

 

You can't just run a quiet sleepy pub any more with two old codgers buying a pint every three hours, even if you own the building outright. The high fixed overheads comprising primarily business rates prevent it, I suspect. 

 

You have a good point but I think rates have always been high.

[WotEver]

23 minutes ago, rowland al said:

As a non smoker, I never really understood the smoking ban when they could have just had smoking/non-smoking bars/pubs. 

Exactly.

 

Just after the smoking ban came into force in the UK I visited Paris for the first time. We were both smokers at the time and wandered into a bar for a glass or two of Vin Rouge. I asked the barman where I could smoke, and he pointed to the far end of the bar where resided several Galloise smoking locals. I said “I thought you had a smoking ban here?”  He replied with typical French pragmatism  “Oui, here is no smoking, there you can smoke.”

 

Our clipboard-wielding local officials made that approach impossible in the UK. 

[MtB]

Just now, Laurie.Booth said:

You have a good point but I think rates have always been high.

 

My perception is that business rates have been increasing way above inflation for decades. 

 

When I got rid of my shop in a posh bit of Surrey the business rates were about two thirds of the rent. Later I heard the rates had overtaken the rent in just three or four years. 

[David Mack]

12 hours ago, dmr said:

and also to build Tuel Lane to full length (with the extra pair of gates).

 

So very short boats can save water by using the two bottom sets of gates!

[Athy]

9 minutes ago, WotEver said:

Exactly.

 

Just after the smoking ban came into force in the UK I visited Paris for the first time. We were both smokers at the time and wandered into a bar for a glass or two of Vin Rouge. I asked the barman where I could smoke, and he pointed to the far end of the bar where resided several Galloise smoking locals. I said “I thought you had a smoking ban here?”  He replied with typical French pragmatism  “Oui, here is no smoking, there you can smoke.”

 

Our clipboard-wielding local officials made that approach impossible in the UK. 

It must have been sometime afterwards - from memory, the smoking ban in France didn't come in until at least two years after the British one.