Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.
Beer was far more expensive 25 years ago - £1.60 in 2000 in the student pub when I first started buying my own beer, that was about half an hour at minimum wage.
On the cost side: Wages are higher, energy costs more, rent is higher (because if the pub can't operate the owner can get planning permission to convert it to a private dwelling and sell it for £600k rather than making £12k a year in rent)
On the demand side: People are healthier and drink less. It's nowhere near as acceptable to go out for a few pints at lunch time. People can't drive to a rural pub.
The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.
Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.
Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.
It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.
It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.
TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.
Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.
no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?
(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)
(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)
Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?
(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).
Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.
How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”
As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.
I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.
Most expensive pint I've paid round here was £6, so pubs are about 2x that - about half hour of adult minimum wage, same as spoons charged 25 years ago.
So how do spoons make a profit?
The main difference that I see is that they buy cheap properties and thus don't have crushing rents.
What this page doesn't show is the increase in rent for these buildings.
Think about the price of a keg of beer - much cheaper/pint than buying beer at a pub or from anywhere else in a smaller size. Very high-volume customers have contracts with distributors that can get them even better deals, sometimes significantly better.
Alcohol is pretty much always sold at a huge markup though - 4-5x is standard in the US. UK regulation might be different, but it's likely that the majority of costs in the pub business are in insurance and licensing rather than alcohol and rent.
One thing I've heard is that they have consistent high throughput so they will buy beer that's closer to expiry and hence cheaper, because they know people will drink it before it goes off.
Dunno how much of an effect that is, it can only account for so much.
To be fair actually £6 a pint does sound more like it, I think I'm getting confused with rounds (so I most often spend £10-£12, but I'm buying two pints)
Nearest town has 3 pubs where rates are going down significantly and 4 where they're going up. I wonder why, is it that the previous setup was unfair to those who are seeing their rates going down?
The pub I do go to each week is seeing rates going up +£3,300. That's not as big an impact from yet another inflation busting minimum wage increase.
However the much bigger concern is that people will be scared to drive there. Currently you can drive there, have a pint, and then go home, and be confident you're not triggering the limit. They're reducing this limit, which means no more trip to the pub.
I'm sure it's fine in big cities where people live in walking distance.
I have no idea what the politics of the CEO of Boeing or Ford or Home Depot is. They don't stand on stages brandishing chainsaws, or writing op-eds about political viewpoints, thus I don't disagree with them on politics. Some CEOs do that and thus choose to associate their companies and their business with politics.
If you make your politics part of your identity, as Adams increasingly chose to do throughout the 2010s, then it will become your identity, and that associates his output with his politics.
I will agree, that promoting a specific ideology will put one at odds. What if you learn about Ford's deleted documents? Home Depot's preferential treatment for some people over others? Does this change your position of the quality of their product? I personally can do business and work with people who are outspoken of their hate toward my belief. I am kept around because of my delivery, despite my religion, which I am thankful. I do not hide my faith within the company but I do not actively speak out because I am conducting professional work.
That was a call out to Javier Milei who famously used a chainsaw during his campaigns in Argentina to talk about cutting waste and he's doing it very successfully while raising Argentina out of poverty & hyperinflation. Milei gave a chainsaw to Musk as a gift for DOGE.
If you are selling a house you have to list on rightmove. You're not going to choose to list on fewer sites. The question then comes if you're selling, why list anywhere else.
As a buyer it's terrible - I want to be able to see size of property (from the EPC, as I trust that more than the estate agent), the sale history, the EPC data, the council tax band, the map of the plot.
I can find that all out manually by hunting for the real address and going from there, but it should be there directly (and filterable)
As a seller you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the buyers are
As a buyer you're forced to use rightmove as that's where all the sellers are
As a competitor how can you argue to an estate agent they should spend money with you as well as rightmove
The problem with that is it reduces the visibility of public news even further. You can have a pulitzer prize winning report onto council corruption, but if only 50 people read it it doesn't really matter.
There's also issues when the watched are funding the watches. If the council funds the newspaper, then the newspaper reports badly on the council, then the council can reducing funding for the newspaper.
You need it to be independent, so how can you fund it. Perhaps a separate precept on the council tax bill which is set separately (say by national government)
The BBC funding model attempts to do this at a national level, but of course nowadays that's not sustainable - part of the failure of the old civic minded establishment in favour of the new edgy profit minded establishment
It's a problem with pretty much anyone. Things are bad from a fundamental structural failings for decades, elect new person, don't see immediate turn-around, they're massively unpopular.
The only way out of this is if you successfully blame $marginalised_group for the peoples problems. Or spend decades undoing the damage, but nobody ever gets decades in power.
Most don't want any of the options presented to them. Almost all the parties don't really serve the electorate, so a large number of people are abstaining.
I appreciate this in an anecdotal but I've spoken to quite a few people I know in my family, that saw it as their civil duty to vote and they told all told me some variation of "there is nobody worth voting for", "I don't think it matters who I vote for".
There are good options I think for most people. I did not like labors party policy, so I voted for the Lib Dems in a large labour area, did it achieve anything for them? No, did I do my civil duty?
I am sure many green voters felt the same way for many years and now they stand a decent chance of getting many seats!
Your best option in your area was a protest vote, but you still believe there are good options. To me that sounds like cognitive dissonance.
I don't vote. There are many reasons I don't vote. However the biggest reason I don't vote is that the whole premise or at least how it is presented to you is false. The way it is presented to you both in school, media etc. is that you are supposed to read the manifesto, consider the candidates arguments and history etc. etc.
People don't do that, they vote for their team. People have their political teams, much like Premiership Football it often comes down to the "Reds vs the Blues" (literally Man U vs Man City).
That might be true, but the votes (not seats, first past the post, almost guarantees people aren't represented):
Labour: 9.7M
Conservatives 6.8M
Reform: 4.1M
Liberal Democrats 3.5M
The point clearly stands that had Reform not been a thing, 2024 would have been a conservative landslide.
What we got was a Labour landslide, what we should have got was some coalition.
As the sibling comment said. You are making the assumption that every Reform voter would have held their nose and voted Conservative instead. A lot more people would have stayed home I think. I don't think anyone thought the Conservatives could win and that includes the Conservatives themselves.
Yes, though I'd be careful about assuming that votes are Conservatives <-> Reform on a left-right median voter model. The other aspect that Reform has (and will have at least until it forms a government) is anti-system/populist credentials. Labour had a little of that last time (they are a deeply establishment party, especially under current leadership, but they were coming off a period as very public opposition to the government and the current state of things) but will have very little next time.
It's certainly not a given that all the 2024 Reform vote would have gone to the Conservatives: a good chunk of it would have likely been disgusted abstention, another chunk to other anti-system parties (mostly of the right fringe, I suspect, but not excluding the Greens despite wild ideological differences), and likely a further (if smaller) chunk to other parties which were simply not the Conservatives (including Labour and the Lib Dems).
Edit: the best analysis on this is likely to be in the latest volume of the long-standing The British General Election of XXXX series, which has just been published online[0]. I haven't had time to look at it yet, though.
Some of it is deliberately attempting to appeal to Reform voters, in ways which have infuriated Labour supporters while not winning any Reform support.
Yet these laws and general direction have been in place through half a dozen prime ministers, including ones initially very popular (Johnson especially, but Cameron wasn't particularly unpopular until the brexit mess)
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