3 minute read

Counting the Cost

Fifty years ago, I was a Leeds University undergraduate drinking the local beer Last weekend, I was a regular in my village local drinking the guest beer

Needless to say, these two experiences share precious little in common Except, of course, for my starring role – and the brand name of my chosen tipple… Tetley’s.

Advertisement

I know I have asserted an unequivocal intention never again to go near a pint of the imposter now masquerading as the love of my formative ale-swilling youth But please bear with me – this is not about either the subtleties of flavour variation or my inability to stick to my word

(And I will throw in this brief, bracketed and italicised note: there was a touch more familiarity about this latest alien incarnation It wasn’t proper Tetley’s, but it was a good pint, with definite hints of my old ‘Hunslet hero’ )

What I am asking you to think about – with further and extreme emphasis on the chasm between then and now – is price.

~

In my first year as a student, a pint of Tetley Bitter cost as little as 12p Half a century later, the Tetley’s Cask in the Nags Head is £4 30

I hear your derisive snort: Haven’t you heard of inflation, you bloody idiot?! So let’s add some context

I began a teaching career in 1976 By this time the price of a pint of bitter had of course risen Online research reveals a UK average of 23p – but in the Midlands and the North I was still paying around 20p. And my starting annual salary was about £4,000, which invites a moment of comparative analysis across the ages Today, government websites suggest a minimum secondary school starting salary of £28,000 – an inflationary factor of 7 from where I began. However, because my pub pint example has risen by a factor of 21, you might just be beginning to see why I’m drawing attention to this marked disparity

Based on these figures, three pints in the pub then cost 0.8 percent of a week’s gross pay; now, that modest amount of leisure activity can consume 2 4 percent – three times as much And though I accept these selective statistics cannot automatically be applied comprehensively across the board, they are certainly accurate, relevant on a personal level, and likely to reflect a general broad truth Which prompts a question: where does that leave the social media debate I’ve recently encountered, which is taking the pub trade to task for trying to drive down beer input prices? ~

What really tasks me is the way financial hardship across the hospitality industry – from manufacture to supply to retail – is generating division between its constituent parts. The severe economic climate is forcing breweries and pubs out of business and, ironically, the close (some would say symbiotic) relationship between the two is pitting them against each other on the fundamental issue of core product cost

Yet, at the same time, we can still buy the small-pack versions of Tetley’s in supermarkets for less than £1/pint (£1 70/ltr) This is an on-/off-trade price differential that didn’t exist in my student days And it begs another question: to what extent is on-trade pricing being used to subsidise cheap off-trade booze?

You may well retort that such a scenario could only apply to the massive brewery conglomerates, and thus seek to exonerate the smallerscale craft industry from any complicity in such devious dealings Except that I’ve sounded off before in this column about craft bar

‘schooners’ retailing at well over a fiver (£8+/pint) – which is far more than the same beers cost on those take-home shelves A quick scan of the Tesco website finds craft beer pint-equivalent prices as low as £1 55, up to £4 85, with a median at around £2 50

~

Off-trade prices introduce a ‘Catch-22’ element, undermining any campaign for real unity across our beer-oriented and beer-loving hospitality sector. An evening out can be prohibitively expensive, and even I succumb to the temptation to buy cheaply and drink at home – sometimes when I’m writing articles seeking to bring together beer and pub champions

But the mounting pressures on the on trade mean the ‘Catch-22’ also works in the opposite direction, against those persisting with its exploitation As pubs are increasingly being priced into submission, the subsidy they provide is shrinking, which will inevitably force up prices in the off trade

The final – and biggest – question is: how many more pubs have to die first?

This article is from: