On the bench

I have great respect for Wetherspoons’ success as a pub operator, but somehow I struggle to warm to their pubs. Thinking about this, I reached the conclusion that one of the key reasons is that they largely eschew bench-type seating in favour of individual tables and chairs.

Traditionally, pubs have always tended to have benches fixed around the walls. This design was used because it works. It's flexible, as you can spread out coats and papers, or huddle close together, it's sociable, as everyone faces in towards the centre of the room, it's adaptable to different-sized groups of people, and it gives a room a distinctive quality of “pubbiness”. It's no coincidence that all of what are regarded as the finest pub rooms have fixed wall seating, whereas one of the most depressing rooms I have ever seen in a pub had plain white walls and nothing but about eight round tables each surrounded by four stools.

So why is it that modern pub designers so often go for having individual loose chairs grouped around tables instead? These may give a place the atmosphere of a gentlemen's club, or a Continental bistro, (or, at worst, a works canteen) but they certainly aren't right for pubs. They mean that people tend to cluster around tables in inward-facing groups rather than talking to each other, and make the place less sociable. They make the person who's just popped in on their own for a pint and a quick read of the paper feel ill at ease, and they're awkward too for groups of more than four.

The only conclusion is that they’re trying to make pubs look and feel less like pubs and more like restaurants.

Tim tells it straight

The ever-outspoken Tim Martin of Wetherspoon’s certainly didn’t mince his words when laying into the Government over its policies towards pubs:

Tim Martin, the chairman, said the high level of tax being levied on the trade was “contributing to the closure of pubs in record numbers”. He said each of Wetherspoon’s pubs generated average taxes of £530,000 but earned only £50,000 in after-tax profits.

“The Government seems not to understand the economic impact of new taxes and legislation and continues to impose new burdens at a huge rate,” Mr Martin said.

“Opportunistic 'tax grabs' and employee legislation to 'curry favour' with voters which businesses cannot afford will prove to be counter productive for the Government,” he said.

The report shows, though, that Wetherspoon’s are doing much better than many of the competition in combating the recession, which underlines the point that how a pub is run can make a big difference even when overall trade is down.

Matching ties

It’s often argued that the existence of the beer tie is a major factor holding back small brewers. However, if you listen to licensees it doesn’t appear that micro-brewers’ products would be top of their list. When asked in a survey what beer they would most want to stock if they had a free choice, the winner was…

Carling!

In fact all the Top 10 were the predictable mass-market kegs.

This gives a clear picture of what life would be like if the tie were completely removed. It might open up more opportunities for the very smallest brewers, but it would lead to a situation where the vast majority of bars were dominated by the same row of national and international keg brands, and the middle ground of brewers would largely disappear. Provided it does not lead to market dominance in specific areas, the brewery tie enhances competition rather than diminishing it.

The pub company tie is a different matter, but the existence of brewers like Thwaites and Robinson’s with substantial tied estates is a major bulwark of choice and diversity in the beer market. Genuine choice results not only from the total number of products available but also the degree to which the market is concentrated. Is there more real choice for the consumer in a market with 100 products, but where two account for 95% of sales, or in one with 20 products, but where 10 account for 95%?

And it should not be forgotten that, without the tie, cask beer would have virtually disappeared in Britain in the 60s and 70s.

Then they came for the chocolate-lovers

As a Scottish GP calls for a tax on chocolate to combat obesity, it seems that no form of pleasure or self-indulgence is now immune from Puritanical censure. The idea that the assault on smoking did not presage an assault on pretty much everything else anyone likes doing has now been stripped of any credibility.

Describing this kind of thing as “health fascism” has sometimes been portrayed as hyperbole, but in reality it does display a genuinely Fascist attitude, that individual adults do not have sovereignty over their own bodies and lives and have to subordinate their own interests to a higher purpose.

In fact many of today’s so-called health crusades have their antecedents in the Nazi era – Hitler was famously a teetotaller and vegetarian, and the Nazis made great efforts to deter their citizens from smoking, drinking and eating meat so they would (supposedly) be better able to serve the Reich. However, I suspect most of the pork and beer-loving Germans took all this with a large pinch of salt.

Back on the shelf

There was good news for Scottish drinkers when the opposition parties blocked the SNP government’s plan to impose a minimum price per unit of alcohol. Whatever one’s views on the merits of the proposal, they were right to insist that it was such a significant change that it should be fully debated in the Scottish Parliament and not just sneaked in via secondary legislation. It is now not likely to come in until well into 2010, if at all.

This followed the release of a study by the Centre for Economics & Business Research which found that consumers in Scotland would pay £80 million more a year – £35 per household – if a minimum price of 40p per unit was brought in, but the policy would do little to help problem drinkers. It pointed out that heavy drinkers tended to be the least responsive to price changes.

There is a hypothesis popular with anti-alcohol campaigners called the Ledermann Theory which postulates that the amount of “alcohol harm” in society is directly proportional to overall consumption, and therefore reducing the latter is in itself desirable. However, the study referred to above suggests otherwise, and I would have thought it was common sense that a substantial rise in the price of alcohol would tend to widen the statistical gap between light and heavy drinkers rather than impacting evenly across the board.

Most of the people buying cheap booze are not doing so because they are problem drinkers, but simply because they’re not very well off. And there has to be a limit as to how much responsible drinkers should be made to suffer in an attempt to deter the irresponsible minority.

Contrasting cats

I’ve always thought that a pub is enhanced by a pub cat, and it’s unfortunate that none of my regular haunts seem to have one.

I was amused the other day to come across here these two cartoons of pub cats (and no, I don’t know what the page is about either, or what relevance it has to pub cats):

Poncy Soft Southern Pub Cat in Native Habitat
Hard Northern Pub Cat in Native Habitat
Obviously this predates the smoking ban!

Smoking ban poll

I recently concluded a poll with the question:

Should pubs and clubs be allowed to set aside a separate indoor smoking room?

Yes: 37 (79%)
No: 10 (21%)

Now, obviously the readership of this blog is somewhat self-selecting, but that’s a pretty overwhelming majority.

The blanket smoking ban remains a gross affront to individual liberty and the issue is not going to go away. I would remind all readers that I am a non-smoker, but not someone who believes anything he doesn’t like should be banned.

To anyone who argues that the smoking ban is a fact of life and pro-pub campaigners should move on, I would respond “if we had alcohol Prohibition, would you not fight it as long as you lived?”

Use it or lose it?

It’s often said of pubs (and of other businesses such as post offices and bus services) that you have to “use them or lose them”. Obviously in a sense this is a statement of the obvious, that if businesses fail to attract sufficient custom, they will go to the wall. However, there’s often an implication that people should make an attempt to visit pubs they otherwise wouldn’t in an attempt to keep them going. Now, I do visit a fair number of pubs and make an effort to spread my custom around and keep up with what is happening in different establishments. The average adult in Britain drinks less than two pints of beer in a pub each week, and there have been few weeks of my adult life when I have not comfortably exceeded that.

But, quite frankly, I have better things to do than go to pubs I wouldn’t otherwise visit in an almost certainly vain attempt to stop them from closing. And in any case, the number of beer enthusiasts isn’t sufficient to keep any individual pub going – they must appeal to a wider public who are only going to be interested in the pub offering the drink, food, service and ambiance that suits them and couldn’t care less about making some kind of statement. It is up to pubs to attract customers, not customers to save pubs.

If you have to say “use it or lose it”, the odds are you’ve already lost it.

Taxing the Sinners

There’s an excellent article here on Sp!ked by Tim Black, who argues that the Scottish proposals to eradicate cheap alcohol are “coercive attempts to control our choices and behaviour”.

While the élite retains its morally inflected disdain for the bevvied-up masses, it is all too clear (if the number of bars in the UK Houses of Parliament is any indication) that they enjoy getting as royally tight as the people they decry. Targeting inexpensive drinking simply targets ‘cheap drinkers’. It’s not the Chenin Blanc minority that are seen as the problem, but the Stella and Strongbow hordes.

As with all sin taxes, the tacit snobbery of the SNP’s proposals will do far more to punish less well-off sections of society than alleviate the suffering of chronic alcoholics. After all, the daily intent, amongst small numbers of very heavy drinkers, to drink oneself into oblivion has less to do with supermarket special offers than with a feeling that one has little to live for. Imposing a minimum price of 40p per unit does not amount to giving people a raison d’etre.

He also refers to the famous quotation from J. S Mill: “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained, is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable.”

Have that drink, girls

While the Righteous have succeeded in getting established so-called alcohol health “guidelines” that had no scientific basis and seemed to anyone beyond anti-drink zealots unrealistically low, it remained some consolation to those of us who did enjoy the occasional glass that moderate drinking was accepted as not harmful to health and indeed there was some evidence that drinking a small amount might be better for health than total abstinence.

It was inevitable, though, that they would be frantically casting about for evidence that any amount of alcohol at all was harmful, and this duly turned up in the form of a study sponsored by Cancer Research UK suggesting that women had a heightened risk of cancer if they only consumed one drink a day. Of course, as this article points out, the study turned out to be a piece of intellectual garbage based on junk science.

…the study fails to meet even the most basic requirement of science – that is, being able to validate its measurements – since it is entirely based on the women’s self-reports of their recollection of their drinking. None of these reports was checked and the authors can make no claim about how reliable they are. No one knows how much or how little these women really drank since no one bothered to measure it.

However, it’s unlikely that a lack of proper science will deter further attempts to justify the “even one drink is dangerous” message. After all, it has now become generally accepted amongst the population that “passive smoking” is a danger to health, despite there being a conspicuous dearth of firm proof that it is anything more than an irritation. And imagine the scope for attacking drinkers and pubs if you can claim that there is no safe level of drinking!

The full mash

Thanks to Dick Puddlecote for pointing out this spot-on piece of analysis from the Daily Mash:

WHY ARE ALL THE PUBS CLOSING? ASK PEOPLE WHO NEVER GO TO THE PUB

MILLIONS of people across Britain who never go to the pub were last night asking why all the pubs were closing down.

As it was revealed that 2000 pubs have closed in the last year, non-pub goers said their community would not be the same without the local pub they never went to.

Margaret Gerving, from Peterborough, said: "I was delighted when the smoking ban came in because it meant I could finally go to the pub without being killed.

"But then I didn't, mainly because I'm not the sort of person who likes going to pubs. I prefer to stay in with a carton of pomegranate juice and a bag of pine nuts and make long lists of all the things I want banned.”

Spoof? What do you mean it's a spoof?

Stronger Pedigree

I’ve always been a little puzzled by beers where the bottled version is stronger than the draught. Fuller’s London Pride, Deuchars IPA, Wells Bombardier and “Morland” Old Speckled Hen all fall into this category. Now Marston’s Pedigree is joining the club with the ABV of the bottled version being increased from 4.5% to 5%. The draught and, oddly, cans will remain at 4.5%.

I suppose the answer is that 5% ales don’t tend to sell all that well in pubs, as they are perceived as too heavy and not sessionable enough, whereas in the Premium Bottled Ales market buyers tend to go for the stronger beers, a category in which Marston’s have so far lacked a “heavy hitter” to compete with the likes of Old Speckled Hen, Abbot Ale and Tanglefoot.

It’s rare to see the strength of a popular beer being increased, though – I wonder if our friends at Alcohol Concern will have a moan about it.

Nanny at the checkout

This is not the first case of its kind, but Tesco recently refused to sell a couple of bottles of wine to a middle-aged professional woman on the grounds she had her fourteen-year-old daughter with her, and might have been going to give the wine to the girl. Of course Tesco apologised afterwards, but it is disturbing that such a mindset exists amongst their staff in the first place. It is yet another example of our growing national paranoia over alcohol. Anyone seriously intending to buy alcohol on behalf of a minor would in any case not take the child into the shop with them. And it fails to recognise the fact that it is not illegal for parents to let their children drink alcohol in moderation anyway.

Making it the minimum

I see the Scottish government are to press on with their misguided plans to impose a minimum price per unit of alcohol. Obviously much depends on where it is set, but anything over 30p per unit will substantially increase the cost of mainstream products in the off-trade. The plan has rightly been condemned as something that will penalise ordinary, responsible drinkers while doing nothing to curb problem drinking. It could even make matters worse, by taking trade out of the hands of legitimate retailers and handing it over to bootleggers. You can just picture the white vans lining up outside Carlisle ASDA.

And it is extremely disappointing to see CAMRA lending support to this plan. Do they really think that this Puritanical crusade against alcohol is going to leave pubs unscathed? And do they not appreciate the difference between imposing a minimum price and banning loss-leading? They are foolishly walking in to the banners’ divide and rule trap.

It still hasn’t been made clear exactly who will pocket the difference between the normal selling price and the government-dictated minimum. Anyway, let’s hope the plan falls foul of European competition law.

Edit: this is an interesting in-depth piece from The Scotsman about the plans.

Creatures of habit

I often find when visiting pubs that you see the same people sitting in the same place every time. Thinking about it, there are three pubs that I regularly visit (say at least twice a month) and, if it’s available, I always choose the same place too. Obviously each pubgoer has his or her own criteria as to the ideal location, as others don’t reach the same conclusion. It’s an interesting facet of human nature that we are such creatures of habit.