Survival of the fittest

Although the pace has slackened a bit in the past couple of years, pub closures are still very much with us. It seems that, whenever a pub closes, someone will say “Well, it wasn’t much cop, anyway, was it?” Apparently, it’s only the crap pubs that close, and good ones have nothing to fear. Well, in a sense that is true. In an environment where the supply of pubs exceeds the demand, inevitably it’s going to be the less well run pubs, those that don’t appeal enough to potential customers, that fall by the wayside. But it’s confusing the particular with the general.

Looking at the wider picture, the overall demand for what pubs offer has significantly declined over the past couple of decades. Obviously that is going to lead to closures, and by definition it’s, broadly speaking, the worse pubs that will close. But that doesn’t mean they’ve closed because they’re bad. The number of closures is determined by the general demand; the specifics of the closures by pub quality. As I wrote here, even if all pubs achieved the standards of the best, it wouldn’t in practice have knocked more than a couple of percentage points off the total number of closures. Back in the 1970s, the average quality of pub was probably much worse than it is now, but they did a lot more business.

There are also other factors at work, the most important of which is location. Indifferent pubs will survive in favourable locations, while with the best will in the world good pubs will struggle in places where the local demand has fallen off a cliff. Some pubs will fall victim to compulsory purchase schemes that are no fault of their own. Some will have much more redevelopment potential than others, and there’s also the willingness of the pubs’ owners to sell them off for alternative use. There may also be factors that encourage long-term loyalty amongst customers even if the current offer is indifferent, including, for example, association with a particular group who regularly meet there, or having historical interest.

As a general rule, there are few pub closures that truly come out of the blue, where you say “Wow! I really didn’t see that coming!” To be honest, as I’ve written before, some pubs have the “smell of death” about them for some time before closure. On the other hand, plenty of pubs seem to stagger on for years without having much going for them because there’s little appetite to develop them into something else, smaller landlocked pubs in run-down secondary shopping areas being a particular case in point.

It’s rather like the oft-repeated mantra that “there are no dangerous roads, only dangerous drivers”, which really is one of the most unhelpful messages ever put out on the subject of road safety. Of course, in a narrow sense, the vast majority of road accidents, excluding those caused by mechanical failure, are the result of road user error. But statistics show that there are some locations, and stretches of road, that see far more accidents than others. This isn’t because road users are suddenly possessed by some kind of mania, but because they offer much more potential to make mistakes and are less forgiving when people do.

So, while the ability of individual road users shouldn’t be ignored, very often eliminating causes of risk. making roads more self-explanatory and mitigating the consequences of error are the most effective ways of reducing casualties. A prime example of this is installing central reservation crash barriers on motorways, which it may astonish younger readers to learn were unknown in the eary 1960s. Saying “only bad drivers have crashes” is no more useful or accurate than saying “only bad pubs close”.