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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2014 20:28:20 GMT
Had a few lagers so excuse the emotional tagline! There are at the moment what, four active and successful pubs/pub-companies on REBS? All very good. Got no criticism of them whatsoever. But (and I hope you'll think this is relevant - maybe it is maybe it isn't) put yourself in the shoes of a publican in 2014. I don't go out much: I hate most of the pop culture, the conversation, the high living. But sometimes I will go out, and I see stickers and signs saying "UNDER 25? BRING I.D." wtmF? TWENTY-FIVE? So let me get this straight: the core pub demographic (or at least one of the larger ones) of 18-25 drinkers is now getting constantly harassed and accused of being children? Then there's the smoking ban: old news I know but it's still a cost borne by the industry. How many feet outside the pub in the rain must one stand now? Are e-cigs still legal inside pubs or must landlords err on the side of caution? And get this: last time I went in, I said "oh it's ok mate, use the same glass".................... "no can do buddy, health and safety" WHAT?  !?!?!!!!! Apparently you can get germs from your own mouth or something: I dunno maybe herpes can leap off your glass onto the pump then onto someone else's glass or something. I have no idea. As it happened, hilariously I caught a cold either from the airborne nasties other people were breathing out (MASKS FOR ALL?) or maybe from the weather on the way home. Wait: weather? Aren't the pubs being made to INCREASE exposure to the elements? Or should we put on our coat, gloves and scarf every time we want a cig? Why the rant? Because what I'm trying to convey is that these things all cost money and those costs are borne by one of two actors: the publican or the customer. If it's the customer, demand falls. If it's the publican, profits fall. Either way, pubs suffer. But wait, the elephant in the room: bar work used to be done by students and dossers, people who weren't doing it as a career but for pocket-money while doing something else they valued. Not any more: it's subject to minimum wage laws, which means they need the BEST: not just any old dosser can get bar work now - you have to bring in net 'surplus value' (as Marx/Cameron would put it) of more than £6.40 per hour every hour, even in slow periods. NET. Bye bye people with 'barriers to employment', bye bye marginal labour. Now we want an NVQ4, and if there just aren't that many career bar-tenders? Profits fall *again*. And what OF that minimum wage? Hike after hike after hike. It's as if someone wanted a permanently unemployed client class for their buddies to leech off of in the name of 'support and advice-giving'!!!!!!!!!!!! All in all I'm very bearish about pubs. 31 a week are closing and there's 55,000 left open. That's not so bad is it, 3% or so a year? All those customers will still want to drink *somewhere*....... up to the individual investor to decide. |
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markr
Member of DD Central
Posts: 766 
Likes: 426
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Post by markr on Aug 15, 2014 10:07:59 GMT
I live next door to a lovely village pub that has a fantastic atmosphere and does great food, but until 2007 I hardly set foot in the place. Why? You've guessed it, I can't stand smoke. Now, we're in there regularly. The people huddled outside in the cold because of the smoking ban are highly visible, the people who are inside enjoying a smoke-free pint or meal because of the smoking ban, aren't. This is why a 2012 study into the ban showed no adverse effect on the pub trade.
What is killing pubs is cheap supermarket alcohol, and what would save them is a minimum unit price, but the government lost its backbone when it came to implementing it.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 15, 2014 14:11:38 GMT
Thanks for your comment comrade. So what we need is more regulation and higher prices. Thanks for clearing that up!
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Post by captainconfident on Aug 15, 2014 15:44:04 GMT
Thanks for your comment comrade. So what we need is more regulation and higher prices. Thanks for clearing that up! He didn't say we need more regulation. He correctly identified the problem of cheap alcohol at supermarkets being the cause of the death of so many pubs. And the solution to that is minimum unit pricing. What's your problem?
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Post by davee39 on Aug 15, 2014 16:13:14 GMT
Health and safety has a point. YOUR Glass can come into into contact with the beer tap and help contaminate the next glass.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 15, 2014 19:59:29 GMT
lol so many socialists!
Of course a price fix for a consumer's good is "more regulation"! Why do you want political favours for pubs that punish supermarkets? On what basis is this morally acceptable?
OK let's say for the sake of argument I accept all of this: you can get AIDS from a pint glass you recently drank out of, etc. etc. etc.
All's I'm saying is these things carry a cost, so when you add them all together, on top of the minimum wage, it's no surprise pubs are closing left right and centre.
My point is that I tend not to be awfully optimistic about the future of a business which is a pub: the State is coming after them and these costs are causing then close all over.
I hope I was clear enough in saying I'm not telling people to AVOID pubs: if you base your decision to invest on sound reasons, that's great. I'm just opening up a topic to see how other people feel, and it's fair to say now I know!!!! LOL
OK anyone here tend to agree with me that all this regulation, price-fixing, demands for ID, no-smoking laws etc. etc. etc. are probably doing more harm than good?
Or is the whole world socialist nowadays!
By the way, admins, my post about the Living Wage related to a current question live on the REBS site about a loan which is at 94% and ready to go to offer. I deliberately didn't bring this controversy to the site as I think it's harmful to the platform and distracts from more important considerations. Short version: why the hell would investors want companies to pay labour prices that are too expensive?
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Post by oldatheist on Aug 16, 2014 20:13:11 GMT
Your definition of a socialist is as accurate as the lunatic right in the USA labelling Obama as a Marxist. Preventing supermarkets dumping cheap booze as a loss leader is not socialism but down right common sense.
Yes lots of pubs have closed but in many cases (especially in towns) they have deserved to close because they sell  beer and food and smell like a bear pit. Most of us are much happier that we don't have to wash all our togs after straying half an hour in smoke filled pub any more. If you want us to return us to that age again vote UKIP as I believe letting selfish gits stink out pubs and restaurants again was in their last manifesto (the one they took off the web site for the local and European elections in case anyone stumbled across how stupid they really are)
Right time for a pint of Oakham Inferno in a smoke free atmosphere, with a bunch of my fellow lefties.
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Post by batchoy on Aug 16, 2014 21:07:49 GMT
The situation is far more complex than just supermarkets selling alcohol but they and the anti-smoking laws are an easy targets.
I live in a small town with a disproportionately large in town 24hr supermarket (bigger than many out of town supermarkets) which has destroyed the majority of the other shops, yet we also have a disproportionately high number of Pubs, bars and restaurants all of which are pretty successful. Go a town over where they a leisure park full of night clubs adjacent to the town centre, and many of the pubs are closing as they cannot compete with the night clubs for the cheap alcohol deals and the night club opening hours. Similarly in many of the surrounding villages pubs are shut or closing because the villages don't have the local populations to support the pubs and with the changes in the attitude to drink driving unless the Pubs have a USP such as a reputation for good dining people aren't travelling out to them because one of the group will have to forgo drinking any alcohol.
On top of this you have the change in business entertaining, up to about 10 years ago taking visiting customers out to lunch was quite the norm and I could guarantee at least one pub lunch a week. These days customers look to our third party accreditation as to a proof our capabilities so we are down maybe one or two customer visits per month and if the audit is a long one then it is a working lunch of sandwiches.
Something else that has changed is that as a family when traveling to weekend events where we have to leave early at stupid o'clock we regularly stop off on the way and breakfast not in a cafe but in a Wetherspoons pub.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2014 20:34:48 GMT
Price-fixing is not socialism? Interventionism is not socialism? The answer to one type of firm out-competing another is emphatically NOT to subsidise the less efficient firm by mandating high prices for the superior firm.
IF people decided that they didn't mind not having all the social benefits of pubs and would rather sit on their own at home with synthetic lager from tins in order to save a few quid, that would be one thing, but frankly in the age of Domino's/Costa/etc. with their double-priced rubbish it makes no sense at all: people seem to prefer costlier choices. That doesn't fit with the supermarket narrative at all. As for 'loss leaders', if you're implying predatory pricing, show me one single example of a company that got rich by cutting prices and THEN INCREASING THEM LATER. It's pure fiction.
I spoke to someone the other night and I realise it's anecdotal but this guy said he was working in the industry when the "can't re-use glasses" law came in and they had to put in two extra shelves to house all the extra glasses they were forced to buy, plus an extra washing machine, and of course at peak times there was a much larger labour bill.
Combined with the hikes to the minimum wage, this is a perfect storm of cost increases, even before we get to the VAT hike and the alcohol duty escalator.
Worst of all is treating the core demographic (18-25 young males) as criminals and demanding they show their papers to armed/armoured security.
Communist. Where are the piles of bodies from when everyone was contracting ebola in the 90s? Didn't think so. The point is, if you don't want to use the same glass again (for those reasons you stated), that's fine, and if you're so OCD about the tap that you consider it a mortal threat to your health and wellbeing, drink bottled stuff. Ah but of course most of that's fizzy and might release some CO2 into the atmosphere!!!!!!!
Personal choice. Almost all pubs had non-smoking areas, primarily for dining but also for games and so on. If pubs want to be entirely smoke-free that's their business: their premises, their rules. Same goes for no under-25s, no swearing, no trainers, whatever mad nonsense they want: it's their premises, their rules.
Passing a law fundamentally changes that. Passing a law is all about fines and power and the boot of the State on your downtrodden face, but there's one thing stranger in this world: people rush in to place their legs in irons. (Ho Chi Minh)
When I was out I also saw the consequences of the "show your papers, citizen" law: I saw two security guards, presumably paid about £10 an hour each, standing outside a pub turning away business. A 27-year-old lad who'd had a lot to drink was refused entry for not being able or willing to show his papers, and everyone present seriously thought it would come to blows. No doubt it has done before now. And for what? To prevent alcohol abuse? ROFL
This is waste on an industrial scale and this country's getting more and more like it. Everything's about politically correct paranoia, people with power laying down the law, and the snivelling peasants begging and pleading and thanking and doffing their caps to their overlords.
Shame on you for applauding it. As investors you should all know better. What we need is a free market, not a Police State.
By the way, "old atheist", how can you believe that a Central Planner isn't required in order to design the eyes of the eagle, and yet a Central Planner is needed to ensure that pubs don't give people herpes?
I'm being deadly serious: so many atheists are of the Left (I'm thinking Daniel Dennett for example, or Jared Diamond). Why? The free market is as wonderful as evolution by natural selection.
Have you seen the Austrian theory of interest rates? I'll make a post in 'Chat' in a second. I find it incredibly moving, and incredibly depressing what's going on in our own country: how can a capitalist society function when things as vital as money itself are socialised and centrally planned?
To draw this thread back into focus, the point I was making (on the assumption capitalist investors would agree with my analysis: little did I know your answer would be a PRICE FIX INTERVENTION FROM GOVERNMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) was that I'm personally bearish about pubs in the p2p market.
I'm bearish about pubs, outsourcers and builders. What you guys favour is your business but the point of a forum is to make the case for your preferences.
Sadly in 21st century Eurasia/America, there's a very narrow range of allowable opinions and any which fall outside of it must be shouted down.
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!?!?!!!!!
beer and food and smell like a bear pit. Most of us are much happier that we don't have to wash all our togs after straying half an hour in smoke filled pub any more. If you want us to return us to that age again vote UKIP as I believe letting selfish gits stink out pubs and restaurants again was in their last manifesto (the one they took off the web site for the local and European elections in case anyone stumbled across how stupid they really are)