The pubs are still caught in a perfect storm of declining demand (demography as much as the economy), rising costs (duties and tarrifs, not just staff and rates), and growing competition (off licences, coffee shops and – of course – cross border shopping).

This is just the start – expect price cuts from January, traditionally the weakest time of the year for the pub trade. And expect lots (and lots) of pub closures …

http://www.turbulenceahead.com

A famous Australian larger is available for the excellent price of EUR3.50 in a South Dublin pub named after a famous writer.

I couldn’t give a XXXX about drinking rip off prices.

the joke info that 1500 pubs closed since 2001
is passed around as some sort of fact it happened since the smokeing ban in 2004 which i figure was the the day the country went to the dogs the goverment has since took on and removed other sections of the irish community all in the name of we know best while the rest looked on .save what is left of the country by letting little pubs of 75 sm resume smoking forget the pride of what martin done and look at what damage it has caused in ireland . in bavaria the tried the same stunt but the population looked at ireland [smokers and non smokers ]and just said it would kill the pub community

Talk about an Irish solution to and Irish problem.
How do you fight inflation in Ireland? Put a price freeze on booze.
Now how sad is that?

A famous Australian larger is available for the excellent price of EUR3.50 in a South Dublin pub named after a famous writer.

Yeah but there’s no way I’m going to Tramco.

We need to get away from the notion of a price being ‘wrong’. Pubs charge a price that they think will achieve the greatest net profit- too high and the margin is great but volume insufficient, too low and volume sold is huge but margin is too low to pay a sufficient return. If the price is too low to make a living and the pub closes, is this still the ‘right’ price? Looking at the current situation, if the pubs are actually making a sufficient margin to allow for price cuts across the board but choosing to go out of business instead I’d be very surprised.
On the issue of voting with your feet, I can’t remember ever hearing anyone saying that they chose one pub over another because of the price differential- nearly always down to what crowd, music, etc. If the competition is with the off trade, again I seriously doubt the pubs have the margins to compete on a price basis.

I am an ex-pub worker of many years both in Dublin and outside. I can tell you now that cutting the price of drink in your pub does nothing for the business, not beyond the very short term at least.

The idea that, say, the level of custom in each of a number of pubs on a street will reflect their pricing differentials in the same way that people would move around supermarkets according to the cost of a basket of groceries in each is just wrong.

That’s not saying that people don’t care about the price of drink, it’s just saying that a publican won’t be rewarded for dropping the price of his pints with a proportional rise in regular custom.

I don’t have the figures to hand but I’m quite sure the CSO had stats that showed that drink cost a higher percentage of disposable income 30 years ago than it does today, as did food.

There are a number of factors that have affected the pubs and they’re all related – the smoking ban isn’t one of them although morning breathalysing might be. But you just can’t finger one thing.

The customer the publican wants the most are the young middle classes, yet these have been driven out of towns into commuter estates in the desperate rush to buy property. Public transport is non-existant and taxis add a notable extra expense to a night out. Childminding is also expensive, and friends often live a lot further apart these days. There is the fear of the morning breathalyser yet, on the flipside, people don’t see the point of spending 20 quid on two taxi rides to go out for just, say, four drinks.

People also have more choices in entertainment, people are more health conscious, people have more things they want to spend their money on, people can afford more foreign trips but still cut their cloth in between those trips somewhat… and so on, and so on.

There are so many reasons why trade has dropped and most of them are entirely outside a publican’s hands, which is why they are floundering and why they sound ridiculous when they complain about it.

Lastly it’s very hard to pitch your pub to an audience – just like a newspaper or a radio station. You want to achieve customer loyalty yet the people who spend the most money are also the most fickle. Young women are terrible customers! They’ll go to a place for only as long as they believe it is fashionable to do so. When they leave the men follow. But young women and their male sheep are the best spenders hence so many crap pubs with high-priced drinks, loud music and no comfort.

Tourists are mostly dreadful customers and seasonal. Students and the elderly don’t spend much. The older middle classes get it into their head that pubs are full of people that are too young for them, don’t want to miss the Late Late and restrict their nights out to maybe one night a week accordingly. Young working class males scare everyone else off as do Travellers (that’s a fact, I’m sorry – I know it’s a wrong state of affairs, but it is still a fact). The very wealthy are as bad as young women for only wanting to be seen in the fashionable joints.

Young middle class couples love the idea of the comfortable yet classy looking pub with indie music audible but not loud enough to ruin conversation. The trouble is, as I’ve tried to explain above, they don’t go out enough.

However pubs will make a comeback. Within a couple of years people will realise they’re bored drinking off-sales and watching reality tv in silence and will go looking for company and atmosphere again… if they can sort out the transport and the child minding…

Jonathan,

I would have hoped my line: “People also have more choices in entertainment” would have covered that point enough without me labouring it further.

Obviously I was wrong.

I think Dealga made the point far more eloquently than I could. Too few of the punters choose their pub on basis of price to make it worthwhile for the publican to chase them.
I think its perfectly fair to describe a customer who requires a lot of labour ot service yet has a low average return as dreadful.

Dealga,
There are lots of people out there, myself included, who were not brought up to believe that in order to socialize you have to drink yourself legless. Instead, they were taught that alcoholic drinks are a wonderful accompaniment to food – the drink makes the food taste better, and the food makes the drink taste better, everybody gets in a great mood and they have a wonderful time.
Go to a Spanish tapas bar, a German bierkeller or a Japanese izakaya and see how it’s done. In addition to beer or wine or whatever drinks, there are dozens of delicious nibbly bits on offer, and they are absolutely brilliant places to pass an evening.
On the other hand, in most Irish pubs you can hardly even get a sandwich and the only thing you can do is knock back drink till you’re on the floor. If pubs want to widen their customer base, maybe they should widen the choice of what’s on offer.

I’d like to strike the cliche from above comment, after all, at the end of the day it’s a game of two halves going forward

“Go to a Spanish tapas bar, a German bierkeller or a Japanese izakaya and see how it’s done.”

Hmmm. I’ll assume, in the interests of polite debate, that you’re not being deliberately condescending. This isn’t 1908 – most Irish people have managed to ’see how it’s done’ at this stage.

The original post is about the price of drink. My posts are not about saying all pubs are wonderful; they are an attempt to explain why pubs are losing business and how none of the three main reasons typically offered for that – the price of drink, the smoking ban and the drink driving clampdown – tell anything like the complete story.

In doing so I simply made a point that, for the average pub, tourists make dreadful customers simply because many spend no money in pubs and they’re seasonal. I’m not really sure why you’re seizing on that specific point – it’s quite straightforward. Your pleasant explanation of how you find a tapas bar an absolutely brilliant place to pass an evening is neither here nor there in that regard.

If, however, your point is that Irish pubs need to evolve to provide a more holistic experience (for want of a less cringe-inducing turn of phrase) to attract more, regular custom then fine – I didn’t argue against that at all and I’m sure that’s all part of the bigger picture I was trying to paint too.

Although, personally, I think wild levels of personal indebtedness, and urban sprawl coupled with our crap transport system, are far more responsible for the demise of pubs