But to be fully honest, most of these people who leave pubs to become plumbers won’t be any good at that either, why? Because it is hard work! It is long hours, with early mornings and sometimes you actually get a sweat on. This might seem that I am being a little bit presumptuous that all plumbers work hard, and a lot of ex pub managers are lazy. Well, I base my view on plumbers on my mate Gipo, who is a pure grafter, and the number of plumbers who have come to my pubs over the years to fix a leaky tap. I also base my view upon lazy ex pub managers upon the 100’s of managers I have met over the past few years, their “old school attitude” and sizeable waistlines.
Brilliant intro to this blog Steve… You first call all pub managers who haven’t done too well fat and lazy, well, I’m sorry but this is going to be the crooks of my argument. How can you be a good pub manager if you are very fat? Working behind the bar is hard work, it gets busy and you have to run up and downstairs, all day every day. Back in the old days when my old managers stood at the end of the bar and drank with the locals, and popped out just before last orders to pick up his “London” pizza which is made for him every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night without fail, all was rosy, and these people were good managers.
I started working in pubs around 15 years ago and the archetypal landlord had his own seat where he could survey his land and make sure people are being served and that no idiots come in and hassle the barmaids. This seat could be anywhere, if the bar was in the right place they would sit at the end of it on a stool, but if the vantage point was in the middle of the bench opposite the bar, then maybe that is the place he would sit. These pubs were all really busy, thriving in the mid 90’s full of cheap beer, nobody wanted any food, and people worked the circuit. Working the circuit was basically a twice weekly pub crawl, in my local town people would start at the Cleveland Bay, move on to the Tiger, then the Woodmans, into the Normanby for a quick one, then either on to The Stap (if there was a band on) or the Pov, back to the Normanby for a few last minute pints before catching the cheap taxi into town.
I’ve worked all over the place, and mid-late 90’s it was the same all over the UK, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Sunderland, Manchester, Birmingham.. I could go on. You all had your local patch of pubs, and they were all the same, offering the same drinks at the same prices, all were closed by 11, so your night would need to move onto your closest high street for more drinks/dancing/fighting until around 2am.
In the current market place, this would seem absurd, all of the same style of businesses doing the same offer. In fact it wasn’t just pubs, my local town had 4 pizza shops right next to each other.
So this would seem that you had a lot of customers and these pubs were just fulfilling their needs?! Correct! Similarly over the past 4-5 years if you head through Putney (SW London), you will see around 10 estate agents right next to each other, granted recently they haven’t been as busy as they have been before, but SW London has been pretty immune to the downturn in the housing market, and these businesses are surviving because the custom is there (at the moment).
So this would seem that you had a lot of customers and these pubs were just fulfilling their needs?! Correct! Similarly over the past 4-5 years if you head through Putney (SW London), you will see around 10 estate agents right next to each other, granted recently they haven’t been as busy as they have been before, but SW London has been pretty immune to the downturn in the housing market, and these businesses are surviving because the custom is there (at the moment).
These pub managers in the early 90’s were fat, and never pulled a pint unless they wanted one and the bar was too busy for them to be served. They were never pushed to improve take, cut back on labour or threatened that they wouldn’t be able to pay the rent, because all they needed to do was order the beer, make sure the staff turned up and open the doors.
This has all changed and it has been driven by all the things mentioned in the first paragraph, and many more factors. 2005 the laws changed so that the Stap and the Normanby could now open later, so all of these people who wanted a later drink didn’t need to go to the Royal Exchange in town, they could actually just stay where they were, and yes, if you needed a really late boogie, you would still hit town. A year or two later and 25% of the high street pubs/bars have closed down. Why? Not enough customers, and the bars that didn’t do their hardest to convince the smaller crowd that they should be coming to their bar rather than the one next door, would soon find it hard.
Oh my, sales are dipping, lets cut costs.. but that would mean me working on the bar and saving £300 a week on employment, I’ll give it a go. Oh, I don’t like this, this seems like too much like hard work I’ll go back to the way I am, and just under staff.
Understaffing, leads to the service being slow,…lets put up prices! Sales are dropping even more because nobody wants to spend that much on beer, and now the glass washer needs changing, that’s £2000, and I still haven’t fixed that broken window. Now all my customers are gone, time to become a plumber!
This was the way that it all went throughout many different pubs, especially closer to the high street pubs. A lot more of the local boozers closed down, and the typical story there would be that the gaffer was only running a pub for free beer and free lodge, when they actually had to use their creative minds to get customers in ,they didn’t have a clue. To be perfectly honest with you, the vast, vast majority of pubs which have been closed, and stayed closed, were really bad, and the managers were really bad. The economic downturn acted as a catalyst to a new kind of ethnic cleansing in pubs, and the success of it would actually make Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic green with envy.
Best bit of graffiti I have ever seen!
What we have been left with is a good thing; we have been left with good boozers with good owners and managers. Also we have been left with good pubs that were ran badly, which had managers with no real foresight, that now have been taken on by good, adventurous operators who are fulfilling the pubs full potential.
Everything has a life cycle, and the old fashioned boozer with the old fashioned landlord has had its time. I’m not saying that there isn’t any still out there hidden away, but in the same vein Virgin Cola is still been sold in some random little country in West Africa.
Everyone is now saying that you need food in a pub for it to do well. Yes, this is the new way that pubs are going, and I don’t believe it started by this London driven Gastro Revolution of the early 2000’s, of certain operators selling pork scratching in a jar with wooden floor and comfy sofas, but from the odd leaseholder looking at the beer tie and actually being a bit clever for once.
“So my keg of Guinness which should be £90 is costing me £140 because of my tie with the brewery, yet that steak is £1.40, I get to buy it at that price and I can sell it for whatever I like without the greedy buggers at the brewery seeing any of the dough.” Also, they got very clever at rent reviews, as the brewery can’t see how much money pubs were taking, they could only really gauge it on how much beer you bought off their company, landlords bluffed – hard.
Food pubs sell more wine, so when they sat down with their BDM’s for a rent review, and they were taking £5k a week on food, and another £2k on wine, they would say that they were only breaking even in the kitchen, and they were pulling sky out to save costs, and because they weren’t tied to the pub company for wine, they would say that wine sales are minimal. Actually what was happening was that the smoking ban was driving new customers and a lot of these were female and big wine drinkers, into their pubs. This spiral of good fortune and lies, set some landlords up to do quite well, by adapting their businesses and trying to play the pub coompanys at their own game.
Now, I said adapting their businesses, all of these new plumbers never had any adaptability and saw a way out by handing back the keys so I can conclude that fat pub managers are very bad at adapting new ideas into their buinesses. As far as I know, not a lot has actually changed in the plumbing industry for many many years, so these guys will be fine. And because the big pub company’s had a lot of pubs that were closed sitting on their asset lists earning no money, they either had to find a new tenant, or sell them on to developers. A lot of big pub companies have been in trouble with the stock market hitting rock bottom, and having any finance agreement cancelled as banks ran a mile from the pub industry, so they sold as many pubs as they could, and this is another reason why 30+ pubs a week have been closing.
Running a pub is now seen as a big risk for people who have never done it before. A lot of people who had a dream of running a little pub in the country then started doing the math and realising it is about as profitable as running a Premiership football club.
All of these pubs in my home town that would be thriving day in day out, are now pretty much empty, landlords change every year or two as another one throws in their keys or they remain closed, waiting for the property market to pick up and get them turned into flats.
All of these pubs in my home town that would be thriving day in day out, are now pretty much empty, landlords change every year or two as another one throws in their keys or they remain closed, waiting for the property market to pick up and get them turned into flats.
Some people will say, oh this is a sad state of affairs, but I don’t, the pub industry rode its luck for far too long, now it has to smarten up. Some great little operators have done very well, Real Pubs, Geronimo Inns, Peach Pubs, The GU Group, Capital Pubs, Food and Fuel, and Fuller Smith and Turner. All of these companies have an eye for detail, and strive to give a great product with great service at a reasonable price.
This is the starting point for the new pub industry, which is fuelled by food (pardon the pun), service and a more diverse offer. Pubs will never die, people will always need a good pint of beer, but now people won’t expect anything but a good pint of beer as they know that the pub, not next door anymore but, down the road will serve a great pint because they need to. And do you know what? You will even get it served by the pretty young lady behind the bar, who is actually the manager.
This is the starting point for the new pub industry, which is fuelled by food (pardon the pun), service and a more diverse offer. Pubs will never die, people will always need a good pint of beer, but now people won’t expect anything but a good pint of beer as they know that the pub, not next door anymore but, down the road will serve a great pint because they need to. And do you know what? You will even get it served by the pretty young lady behind the bar, who is actually the manager.
