Simon Glover Partner, ODD
While the smoking ban represents a serious and current issue for many pubs, everyone accepts that smoking in public is destined for the history books. The Marlboro man may have been the ad icon of the 20th century but as todays’ youth-market matures, they will no longer associate pubs with smoking at all. They’ll have a pint over their food, not a smoke over their pint.
Interestingly for Wetherspoon, profits from food sales continue to grow, so clearly they’re doing something right. But is it through marginalisation of suppliers and improving economies of scale or by making the portfolio a destination for good old PubGrub. I imagine the former. Elsewhere, the familiar, multi-cuisine menus we see in Wetherspoon and the like are being replaced with higher quality, more interesting ingredients and the communication surrounding them oozing provenance.
But pubs aren’t just about food. They’re also about the Craic; grabbing a coffee; getting drunk and catching up with old friends. They’re about all these things and perhaps that’s the problem facing Wetherspoon, who are the Primark of pubs, the volume seller, the high street superstore. I can do everything at a Wetherspoon pub – I can even download a screensaver from their site to remind me of the experience. But the experience isn’t a good one, not unless it’s based solely on value.
Call me old-fashioned but maybe we’ll see a rejection of the Pub Organisation, only now going into decline since its rise to fame in the 1980’s. In the meantime, the challenge for any pub chain is replication of the original public house principals: a local, uber-personal, focal point of the community. Dare I say it, where everybody knows your name?