PDA

View Full Version : The Pub Curmudgeon - Looking for a role



Blog Tracker
11-06-2018, 13:05
Visit The Pub Curmudgeon site (http://pubcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2018/06/looking-for-role.html)


Phil of Oh Good Ale (https://ohgoodale.wordpress.com/) has recently been recounting his experiences doing the local CAMRA Mild Magic trail. In his concluding post (https://ohgoodale.wordpress.com/2018/06/10/around-manchester-on-a-half-of-mild-4/), he makes some very thoughtful observations about the current state of the pub trade.

So, what’s going on out there? Pub-going is changing; like Spinal Tap, its appeal is becoming more selective. The progressive denormalisation of alcohol and social drinking, as a part of everyday life, is continuing to drive pub-going numbers down – or rather, it’s ensuring that losses in pub-going numbers (which are inevitable with social and cultural changes, plus the march of time) aren’t being made up by equal numbers of new drinkers. There is a new breed – or a number of separate, partially overlapping new breeds – of drinker; it’s not just a few hundred hipsters, but on the scale of the population as a whole their numbers are tiny. We can get a false impression from looking in the wrong place, I think. People come from miles around to destination bars in the town centre (and Chorlton), and those bars get pretty crowded at times – but if they’re in town, those people aren’t drinking in the pubs where they live. Thanks to a range of social changes, many of them positive, pubs have lost what used to be their steady clientele (defined roughly as “every unmarried male over the age of 14 and a large proportion of the married men”) – and people who know their Beartown from their Beavertown aren’t going to fill a gap that size...
...There are places where an old style of pub-going doesn’t seem to have gone away, but there are many others where it seems to have died completely, leaving big multi-room pubs waiting for a clientele that isn’t to come back (or not more than a couple of times a week)...
... That’s the world we’re in now, pretty much; unless that wider trend towards denormalisation can be reversed, the pub industry’s going to be facing lean times – or rather, even leaner times.This echoes several of the points I’ve made in the past in posts such as this (http://pubcurmudgeon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/whatever-happened-to-pubs.html) and this (http://pubcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2017/12/that-was-then-this-is-now.html), that:

The “denormalisation” of drinking alcohol, especially in a social setting, is one of the key factors in the decline of pubs

People increasingly see going to the pub for a drink, if they do it at all, as a distinct leisure activity in its own right rather than something woven into the fabric of everyday life
“Use it or lose it” is a simplistic and not very helpful statement. The problem isn’t so much existing pubgoers visting less, but demographic churn not replacing them with a new generation

While some pubs, in specific locations, catering to specific markets, continue to thrive, many others, even if still open, are all too visibly “running on empty”.


More... (http://pubcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2018/06/looking-for-role.html)