REFLECTIONS ON CO & PLANS FOR THE FU THIS MONTH, DRAM SPOKE TO SEVERAL KEY OPERATORS TO FIND OUT HOW BUSINESS HAS BEEN SINCE THEY REOPENED, HOW THEY ARE MANAGING TO BRING STAFF BACK FROM FURLOUGH, WHICH NEW TECHNOLOGY THEY ARE USING - AS WELL AS WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS NOW THAT EAT OUT TO HELP OUT IS OVER AND THE FURLOUGH SCHEME IS TAPERING OFF. BY JASON CADDY
JOHN BURNS OWNER BLOC+ GLASGOW
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e are operating at a 72-seated capacity in a venue with a 190 total legal capacity, which is not bad considering we had 78 seats before restrictions came in. We were able to keep more seats by shuffling things around and moving out the sound decks and the DJ table. We are now doing in excess of 100 covers per day compared to around 400 pre-pandemic. We made a decision not to take any pre-bookings. If you go down the two-hour slot route, say, I feel it can encourage binge drinking as customers quickly order more drinks at the end of their time slot before moving on. And what happens if you get a two-hour booking and they only stay for 45 minutes? Then you’re left with a dead table. And if the food takes, say 45 minutes to arrive in a two-hour slot when it’s busy, it can leave customers feeling cheated and this can lead to animosity. That’s why we continued to operate a first-come, firstserved system. We looked at all apps and decided against all of them. If you’re busy for food, and if you have 10 tables arrive in space of 10 minutes, all the orders coming through at once will overwhelm the kitchen. You need staff on the floor interacting with customers to regulate the flow of orders to the kitchen as well as knowing which food is for whom so that they don’t have to ask the customers in each party. Apps also impact negatively on tips. We have metal QR codes on tables for contact and trace, which
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once submitted bring up the menus. This is free (apart from getting the metal signage made) and is a useful tool for the future because we can adapt it to promote live events etc. All 25 staff at Bloc+ were furloughed and some are back full time and some are on flexible furlough and I only had to let go of two staff because they weren’t comfortable with coming back to work. But once furlough ends I think it’s going to be apocalyptic and the biggest disaster to the trade in living memory. How is a business that is turning over 40 per cent of what it used to do expected to survive? I think there is going to be mass redundancies and I know lots of people are being laid off already. We are getting 10 new job applications a day - which is what we used to get a month pre-COVID. We are a live music venue that puts on 400 bands a year and if it weren’t for our food offering we would be in desperate trouble. Eat Out to Help out as made us marginally busier and I understand that this has proved to be a huge benefit to those that aren’t ordinarily busy for food whereas we were and still are. I think that the restrictions on background noise are having the opposite effect to what they are intended for. I think that low-level music acts as a buffer to help groups hear what is being said in their conversation bubble because the music stops conversations from other ‘bubbles’ wafting over. Whereas now customers have to compete and so people are talking louder.
