A pint of two halves

There’s recently been another outbreak of discussion on the vexed issue of pubs charging more for half-pints than a strict 50% of the price of a pint. So I thought I would run a Twitter poll to gauge people’s attitude to this practice. The conclusion was pretty negative, with almost two-thirds viewing it as totally unacceptable.

POLL: A growing number of pubs are charging a premium for half-pints compared with pints. For a £5 pint, what is the maximum price for a half you would find acceptable?

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) December 10, 2023

In fact, I addressed this subject in my magazine column back in 2013:

RECENTLY there seems to have been a rise in the practice of pubs charging more for a half than exactly 50% of the price of pint, something that for many years has been commonplace in Ireland. Many drinkers find this irritating, especially given that the growth in the number of rare and one-off beers means that drinking halves is a lot more common than it used to be.

The usual reason given is that the overheads in terms of staff time and glass-washing are the same for a half as for a pint, and thus some kind of premium is justified. However, in general, pubs serve far more pints than halves, and the fact that they do sell a few halves is unlikely in practice to result in any measurable extra cost.

Cost should never be the sole factor in pricing – you also have to bear in mind consistency and what people feel happy to pay. The aim should be to establish a fair and reasonable pricing structure that covers your overheads without any anomalies. Pubs don’t, for example, charge more for beer in the winter to cover the additional costs of heating and lighting.

While I’m never going to man any barricades about it, charging more for halves seems to me to be something that needlessly antagonises customers for little or no benefit to the pub. It’s quite simply a bad business practice that has no place in an operation that depends so heavily on customer goodwill. Plus it’s not hard to imagine the anti-drink lobby getting up in arms over effectively giving people a discount for drinking more.

There’s not really much more I can add to that. Yes, in a narrow accounting sense it does cost a pub slightly more to serve two halves than a pint, but it’s utterly trivial and can’t add up to more than a few pence. And a pub’s rent, staffing and energy costs are pretty much fixed, so saying that a half costs more is merely the product of a method of accounting allocation.

I doubt whether any pubs doing this have carried out any kind of detailed analysis of costs – they just do it because it seems a bit on-trend. Pubs sell all kinds of products at different prices with different mark-ups – are they going to investigate each one to determine the staff labour involved in serving them and the typical customer dwell time?

It must also be remembered that cost is only one input into pricing decisions – prices must also pass a test of customer acceptability. If a pricing practice antagonises a significant subset of customers it’s probably a good indication that you shouldn’t be doing it. And draught beer in general is one of the pub products with the lowest mark-up, because it is the item that customers use to make price comparisons between pubs.

And, of course, Wetherspoon’s don’t charge a premium for halves.

Unfortunately, raising this topic on Twitter provoked a few predictable responses along the lines of “real men don’t drink halves”. I thought that kind of stereotypical machismo had been confined to the past.