Number of pubs in England and Wales falls to record low | Hacker News Reader

Number of pubs in England and Wales falls to record low

theguardian.com

173 pointssamizdis326 comments

People who've never spent significant time in the UK may not appreciate the significance that pbus have played in the UK culture and social structure. Pubs have for many eyars been a social nexus. You wouldn't even go to drink necessarily but just go by default because that's what everyone else was doing.

These are quite typically "locals" rather than going somewhere to go to a pub in particular.

So this is really a long term trend in the changing social structure of the UK. Pubs are becoming less important socially, probably conciding with the rise of Internet culture and online connectedness. But also real estate prices come into play. Pubs sit on some valuable land, particularly in London. Costs go up to the point where you might be paying 8 pounds for a pint. That gets really expensive.

I haven't seen anything close to this in the US. Take something like the bar in How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spen da lot of time there but it's still portrayed as extremely intentional, meaning plans are made to meet there. UK pub culture doesn't tend to be that intentional about meeting particular people but rather hanging out where others may or may not show up.

> probably conciding with the rise of Internet culture and online connectedness

Possibly also related to the greater ease of accessing, e.g., sports on TV compared with 10-15 years ago - now you don't need a satellite dish etc., you can just stream Sky Sports over the internet which cuts out the need to find a pub showing whatever match you wanted (assuming you're not doing it as a social activity.)

You should try visiting New Orleans.

Pubs were closing long before the internet appeared, albeit in smaller numbers.

The main driver, in my opinion, is specialisation. We've got a much more professional workforce these days, with more specialist skills, who for this reason often have to travel for some distance to get to their places of work. That means far less time to go to the pub. Combined with modern media, it's just easier to sit indoors. People have posted other points elsewhere on this thread - they're all contributing (plus drink driving laws and smoking bans).

I mean, a lot of people used to stop working at lunchtime and spend the afternoon in the pub.

Now, if home working holds up, and then inflation abates a bit, perhaps pubs might regain an advantage, but I fear we're now in a new "steady state", and it'd take more to change things back.

25c beers, air conditioning and a color TV that always had the Phils on, yeah our local pub was always packed during the baseball season.

Out of curiosity, when was that? The last time I was in a place with 25c beers, I was watching the 2001 Daytona 500.

> UK pub culture doesn't tend to be that intentional about meeting particular people but rather hanging out where others may or may not show up.

Interesting, other than 'the locals' propping up the bar, that's not my experience at all.

I think going to each other's homes (on a smaller scale and in a less organised way than 'a party') is more common now. For whatever reason, I wouldn't like to say, could be fashion, could be the other side of 'the pub is too expensive', or something else.

I want to raise another contributor: volume. At most bars in large cities, if I'm in a group of six people, I can not hear someone talking who isn't sitting directly next to me.

The parent commenter said "Take something like the bar in [the television show] How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spend a lot of time there". The only reason they can meet there and hear each other is because the bar is silent and they're actually on a sound stage. Watch any show where any characters interact at a bar: they talk comfortably in a way that would not work in real life.

Bars and restaurants have simply gotten measurably louder to the point where people are choosing to meet at home instead. When English Pubs and U.S. speakeasies became popular, amplified music was not a thing. Even the name "speakeasy" comes from the fact that people could and did speak quietly in the bars!

> But consider a 1993 study of about a dozen dining establishments, which found that sound levels peaked at 68 decibels (a little louder than normal chitchat). Compare that with a much larger 2018 survey of New York City restaurants, in which one-quarter hit at least 81 decibels (more like a garbage disposal), the average level was 77, and just 10 percent were 70 decibels or below. The report deemed those “quiet.”

https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/restaurant-noise-lev...

Scientific papers abound

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...

> There are increasing numbers of reports from patrons complaining about the difficulty in conversing with fellow diners due to loud venues. In Zagat’s 2016 Annual Survey, when surveyors were asked what irritated them the most about dining out, noise was the second highest complaint (25%) behind poor service (28%). But in major urban cities of San Francisco, Boston, Portland and New York City, noise was the number one complaint [34]

Very good point.

It's worse than not fixing it, the trend is to make it worse, by removing soft furnishings etc.

Saw an article recently on loud restaurants (the loudest in the world are in London, followed by SF iirc) - the top few in London were measured as so loud that per the law (I assume it's not known/adhered to) they have to provide staff with hearing protection from the injurious volume!

This is a huge thing to me and many others who I’ve spoken with. My spouse seems to be able to handle it just fine, but to me it’s just a wall of sound all around me and it has led to frustration that they cannot hear me and I cannot hear them.

It’s become true at even many very “nice” restaurants as the open kitchen, open spaces, and hard surfaces everywhere aesthetic has taken over nearly everything.

Strong seconding here. I have a low voice that doesn’t travel well in noisy environments. It’s pretty tiring having to shout an entire night out just to converse across the table.

I've found that people cannot think deeply about much of anything when it's loud. They can answer simple fact-based questions about themselves and not much else. Useless.

> Even the name "speakeasy" comes from the fact that people could and did speak quietly in the bars!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakeasy

The more common explanation is that it's a place where you have to speak easy to not attract attention.

It makes sense too, since without amplified music being popular why would the speakeasy be specifically quiet rather than just "like everywhere else".

I’ve read that bars getting louder was in part deliberate since people drink more quickly when they have a hard time having a conversation.

Yeah. In restaurants it's also to increase table turnover.

>Bars and restaurants have simply gotten measurably louder to the point where people are choosing to meet at home instead. When English Pubs and U.S. speakeasies became popular, amplified music was not a thing. Even the name "speakeasy" comes from the fact that people could and did speak quietly in the bars!

I agree 100% there are even some 'trendy' stores I've visited where the volume of the music was so loud I just left and have never gone back. There are some 'clubs' that are just immediate hearing loss damage, and everyone who goes there will pay for it later in life. Just a massive wall of sound that is waaaay outside safe hearing for any length of time - noisier than any construction zone.

People aren't meant to talk on a dance floor and wearing earplugs is common.

Bars and the quieter zones of clubs are different though: we're meant to socialize. People are opting out of the whole thing and I think it's because of the volume. Go to any bar during the summer that has music inside and a quiet outside and watch where most people go.

I strongly think that the patrons themselves don't actually recognize why they even like outside so much better.

Wait. If people are wearing ear plugs why not just have the music at a volume where it doesn't literally damage and hurt people instead? I am so confused

Well then the people with the earplugs in couldn't hear, could they?

I'm with you on group size and volume. I'll add another: a lot of bars tend to be annoyingly dark. Volume could either be music or TV. Sports bars are big in the US.

When faced with unkowns, I'll tend to gravitate to hotel bars for this reason. Not too busy, not too loud, not too dark, as a general rule.

It's also why i tend to prefer going out to eat at off-peak times.

Eh, here in Ireland nearly anywhere I'd describe as a "pub" is still relatively quiet unless it's a busy night with live music. Most pubs don't have particularly loud piped music, or they have none at all.

Now there are a host of modern "bars" with extended drink and cocktail menus and cacophonous piped music, especially in city centres. But in most traditional pubs the ambient noise comes almost entirely from the patrons.

Even without music or a TV playing, many bars can be deafening simply due to the way the room is designed and decorated. There is a lot that can be done to address this, like sound baffles on the ceiling, but most bars either don't care or prefer to keep the room loud.

> The parent commenter said "Take something like the bar in [the television show] How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spend a lot of time there". The only reason they can meet there and hear each other is because the bar is silent and they're actually on a sound stage. Watch any show where any characters interact at a bar: they talk comfortably in a way that would not work in real life.

The bar in the show is (very) loosely based on a real-world location: McGee's Pub in midtown Manhattan. While I haven't visited in quite a few years, when I did visit, the pub was typically quiet enough to have a conversation at your table without raising your voice.

That's not something I'd say applies in the UK. Save for large city-centre pubs on Friday night, most are relatively quiet. If it's too loud to have a conversation then someobody is guaranteed to ask them to turn it down. Having a conversation is one of the main reasons to go to the pub. It's pretty much the only place in the UK where it's normal to strike up conversation with a stranger.

Yeah in the UK I could go to a pub by myself and find people to chat with and hang out with.

In Finland? People don't get social like that. People in bars will stare at their tables and drink for an hour or five, then leave - but not speak to others.

(OK sometimes it happens, especially later at night, but the idea of going to a bar here for company is very alien.)

IMHO an under-appreciated side effect of rising property values is the destruction of third places (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), a role that pubs often filled in the UK. As land values rise the pressure to make a return on any given space goes up. Leads to fewer places to "hang out" without strong pressure to spend money.

Damn. Working from home I don't even have a second place.

And with skyrocketing rents and house prices, hanging on that first place presents a challenge.

Land value tax would solve this.

Perhaps in the very long term. But drastically increasing taxes on property would certainly not improve things for home owners who'd still have to keep paying their mortgage as well. And even renters would likely find their landlord passing on much of the taxes...

The solution for low-income groups we want to protect (like retirees in their primary home) is generally to defer the tax until their home is sold. And ideally it would reduce their cost of living for other reasons, since land value near them would be deflated and properties would be improved so there's more workers in the area, there's less reliance on other regressive taxes like sales tax, etc.

You don't want to protect groups like that, as it means that they tie up valuable properties in economic centres and workers can't afford to live there. The failures of rent control in Sweden for example, are a great example of this.

Tax wealth, not work. Income tax should be near zero (especially <$100k), and instead tax property with land value tax, property tax, inheritance tax, etc. so that people can work their way up.

The main reason you want to do that is they're the average voter. Young people don't vote. They also might not have a community/family/friends anymore and might not be capable of relocating.

LVT is a better-designed alternative to property tax; taxing property (improvements to land) has the downside that you want people to improve their land, and taxing that would cause deadweight loss.

Homeownership cannot be saved. Do LVT and maybe bsil out people with underwater mortgages with a debt rightoff, but do not preserve SFH ownership.

Don’t know why you think giving the government even more money is gonna solve anything.

You're lazily strawmanning and failing to offer an alternative to a constructive suggestion.

This comment has negative value.

Taxation doesn’t give the government money; the government is the source of money and can create more if it wants to. Taxation destroys money, which is good if you think there’s too much of it.

(Some exceptions to this model due to federalism, since state and local governments don’t get to create money except by issuing bonds and getting federal funds for unwise construction projects.)

This is my biggest complaint with the remote revolution right now. I don’t get out of my house anymore during the week and it makes me sort of stir crazy by the weekend.

Going to church or other religious assembly seems like your only option, doesn't work for me though.

Ever considered becoming a furry instead?

As a way to destroy property values, sure, all the time

Wouldn't it be more aptly described as a conflict between the relative rate of increase in (urban) property value vs wages ? Arguably entirely a function of monetary policy for the past decade plus.

[0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/how-uk-house-p...

... pbus ... eyars ...

- typed while in the pbu, clearly

> You wouldn't even go to drink necessarily but just go by default because that's what everyone else was doing.

Price, health aspects, time (when two people work full time, fitting in hours of drinking is harder) and possibly good availability of alternative neuro-affective substances aside, I think this is the actual "problem" pubs have now.

Not long ago, in living memory even of millennials, "going down the local" was literally your only option in a lot of rural and suburban places.

People just have things to do with friends these days that tickle the dopamine centres more than cheap beer, dirty toilets and sticky carpets. Phones, games, thousands of hours of TV and films, hacking on Linux kernel drivers over Discord, whatever. You don't even have to always physically meet up any more to hang out, and you certainly don't have to pay by the minute for telecoms any more. Once the network effect of "that's just where my mates are going to be" is gone, so are you.

When I studied abroad in Wales, it was literally the only thing to do in the evening. We had no TV. We didn't even have wifi at first (they added it a few weeks into the term). The student village wasn't a short walk from anything of interest. Everyone hung at the pub at the center of the student village.

I’m a nondrinker but that sounds great

Lived something fairly similar in the UK a decade ago. It was great especially when you consider how pubs are organised. The place makes it very easy to come and go and as service is at the bar and you can order both food and alcohol you don’t really feel pressured into drinking. That’s the part of the UK culture I miss the most.

I've heard this is because homes in the UK are comparatively smaller than in the US, so UKers go to pubs and other Third Places while Americans meet at their houses.

That and pubs and 3rd spaces are closer. I have a pub 30 second walk from my house. Probably 10 within a 20 minute radius (walking).

Indeed. In the US, unless you live in a city or a suburb with shopping complexes within walking distance, you have to drive to a pub.

I’m sure it’s one factor but probably not a defining characteristic. There are several countries with more similar home sizes to the UK in continental Europe that at least anecdotally seem to prefer meeting in homes, sometimes even more than in the US.

Interesting to note the etymology, as well. Pub comes from "public house"; a house for the public.

It's not just that pubs have to pay more for real estate, so do all their customers, and house prices have long outpaced wages in the UK. This will affect the younger generations more, but I always see it framed as "Young people just don't go out like they used to", rather than, "Young people have less disposable income and can't afford to go out like they used to"

Regarding the land prices argument, I think there are a reasonable number of buildings which must be run as pubs and may not be e.g. converted to more lucrative uses. Though the local economy does influence the prices that must be paid for labour and the prices customers will be willing to pay. I expect you’re more likely to do well as a pub by having e.g. a wide rotating selection of beers rather than trying to compete with spoons on price.

A separate issue may be rent. The pub in my parents’ village was owned and successfully run by some locals for a while until they wanted to retire and sold it to a large company. That company would then lease the pub to people who would either fail to do well (and cause the village to get fed up with the pub) or do well only to have the owning company turn around and try to increase rents (and offer those people no reasonable path by which they might come to own the pub themselves), driving them away by making the business unsustainable.

The article doesn't mention it, but another consideration regarding change in the UK is demographics. In areas of London where there has been an influx of Muslim immigrants, the local pubs tend to close down due to lack of demand.

Muslims are less than 5% of the UK population, so Islam can at most account for only a small part of the decline.

Another article I read called the pub "England's living room". It fits the stories my brother told as he used to work in England (we're from the Netherlands). He'd describe that workers would immediately continue to the pub after work, after which their wife would bring a home-cooked meal directly to the pub. And the children might visit for an hour or so too.

Anyway, different times. Some trends I'm spotting in the Netherlands that I suspect would also apply to the UK:

Young people drink far less than before. When they do drink, they may first home drink cheaply and only then attend a pub (or club) extremely late at night. Others rarely attend a pub at all and prefer infrequent big events like concerts, where often they pop a cheap XTC pill and drink two sodas.

And yet another group are truly "digital natives", my nephew is one of them. Their idea of a great Saturday night is to play a multiplayer game online. They never go anywhere, they rarely ever meet new people.

Still, it's not just young people. Over here middle-aged (and older) people also seem to come far less than before. I think this has to do with life being so damn fast and busy, it's much different compared to a few decades earlier.

You can't really stop it, times change. Still it saddens me to see another socially important physical place go the way of the dodo.

So pubs weren't insanely expensive back then?

Seemingly not, from a hasty look for data. [1] shows the price of a pint of lager across 1973 - 2017 increasing from 17p to 358p while the Bank of England calculator [2] shows an increase in line with inflation would have been 138p.

Of course pure inflation doesn't directly match changes in consumer spending ability, but crudely it suggests pub beer has become relatively more than twice as expensive, possibly because of tax increases (as with tobacco the govt can increase revenue and call it a health-improvement measure)

[1] https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2018/01/average-uk-draug... [2] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

In the Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy, circa 1978, six pints of beer would have costed around 2 pounds, and for some reasons this dialog always stuck with me:

https://boakandbailey.com/2014/04/six-pints-for-less-than-a-...

Now I'm depressed in two ways: firstly I didn't instantly recognise the reference (getting old...) and secondly, last time I was in London the bartender would have replied "From a fiver? That doesn't cover the first pint!" (getting old...)

When we did a family vacation in the UK in ... ~1997-1998 or so, a pint was a 2 pounds, everywhere we went. (Wales, Scotland, England; mostly rural). Could have been an "obviously not from here price" or something; I didn't see locals getting charged any less or at least I don't remember it.

Correct.

I think I'd pin the primary cause as the cost of living increasing rapidly and salaries not keeping up with inflation. Couple that with it becoming increasingly obvious that alcohol consumption has negative health effects and it's not surprising that people look for other forms of entertainment.

There's also just more to do in the modern world. There's things like raves as you pointed out, video games, the online world. There's also a million new hobbies which are now much more accessible thanks to the internet and online stores, and much more media content. Compare today's access to entertainment to the pre-television era...

And finally, to top it all off, we have technologies like instant messaging. Instant messaging makes it possible to group text your pals after work and decide to meet anywhere you like. Before that, coordinating with a large group of people was a lot more complex and took some planning ahead, so maybe it was just easier to default to always meeting to the pub after work.

Well, as GDP keeps rising, so inevitably is consumption. Whether the money comes from salaries or otherwise, doesn't matter. People drink less, and this is good.

GDP rising doesn’t necessarily mean normal folk are consuming more. GDP can rise if people are simply spending more for the same thing and buying less of it. It can rise if fewer people are buying anything but some people are spending far more for certain luxuries.

I don't agree with the cost of living remark.

The main reason is that contrary to pubs, restaurants are doing extremely well. At least where I live. Quite a few pubs are converted into restaurants and they're full all of the time. Even in my small town. For sure there's a COVID catch up effect, but this is a long running trend. It suggests that just price is not a very strong driver for changing behavior.

Yes, a full time pub life is increasingly rare, but as it comes to health, I don't think it's a serious consideration for young people. Or the particular group of young people looking for "fun". They still drink, just differently. Or do lots of drugs. Health seems the least of their worries.

I do agree with your last point: many more distractions and types of entertainment. Pubs might have filled a void that no longer exists.

Except for one: spontaneous socializing. You can just walk into any pub and with a bit of luck, have an interesting/healing conversation, meet new people, perhaps even a friend, or find romance. Nobody in the pub would find any of it awkward as that is kind of the point of a pub.

I don't really feel the times you refer to in the first paragraph were very good for the people living this. You forgot to mention that this was only really a thing for the lowest classes of blue collar workers. Think people working in a factory or coal mine. You'd never see the boss/owner in the pub, it was only for the workers.

They had a job for life, as with their limited education - finishing school at 16, if they were lucky - there were no other prospects. They couldn't afford a car or bus to commute to another town, they'd have a bike to get around their local area. The pub was a place for them to socialise, after a physically exhausting day of work, blow off some steam and escape from their problems.

Even now I guess this still exists in some areas, but the UK has transformed a lot over the past 50 years, going from many industrial jobs to many service oriented jobs, and people are wealthier. Finishing school is basically a given, owning a car is an affordable option to basically everyone - it's not a luxury like it was then.

I had a couple of uncles (who would be in their 80s if still around) who lived like this, their job was working in a local quarry. They both died at a young age (late 50s) from various ailments, but even when alive they were borderline alcoholics and both divorced. Their father lived the same, and I guess his father too. At the weekend maybe they'd go fishing or gardening, then back to the pub in the evening. I'm glad my parents managed to escape that.

I was raised in a remote part of the UK where the main industries now are farming and tourism. Every village had a pub, and quite a few have closed down. Those that still survive have transformed to focus on food and providing a more upmarket experience - not the pubs you see on old movies full of alcoholics where the smell of alcohol is masked by the smell of tobacco.

The other part missing from that is that 50 years ago there were almost certainly no women in there. If a wife brought food, she would then leave. It's a world of difference now, where pubs are family places. That's something that's only really happened in the last 20 years or so.

I still remember having to ask if the pub had a "family room" if we wanted to have a ploughman's after a hike

Not according to this WW2 newsreel educating American GIs on pub etiquette:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GCcoaSq3x4

It saddens you that people now consume less alcohol?

My take on Netherlands and Uk culture is that the they (still) drink too much alcohol.

They rather drink beer all night than have a proper dinner at a restaurant, which still blows my mind.

The amount of alcohol some cultures consume is excessive, and I’m glad they’re reducing it.

I think it is as much as where you consume it. Supermarket prices for alcohol have increased but no where nearly as much as in pubs and bars. So the drinking is happening somewhere else and not in pubs.

The increase in prices can probably mostly be laid on product cost and business rates. This is also being reflected in other retail sectors. There are many store closures in both the high street and in out of town retail parks.

I agree that sometimes the drinking is a bit excessive, But I would be sad if pubs disappear and going our becomes more static.

The issue with a "proper" dinner in a restaurant is that (next to it often being to much food which lead to other issues) it feels more like a chore/lethargic/static. specially if done multiply times a week.

While going to a pub you can play a game of cards/pool/darts, walk around and more easily talk to a new bloke you have never seen before.

My point is, (regardless of the drinking) going to a pub is over all more social then sitting in a restaurant.

In some cities it’s common to eat out at restaurants every day (eg Shanghai). So I guess different cultures handle their after work social life differently.

My opinion has been that since you need to eat dinner anyway (although I’ve seen Dutch and English people skip dinner to drink), you kill two birds with one stone.

"In some cities it’s common to eat out at restaurants every day (eg Shanghai)"

I didn't think of this... so thanks! Going to checkout a bit how others indeed handle the work social life.

I would point out that skipping a meal to drink is not the norm at all in the UK. I live in the UK and would think this behaviour very odd (particularly outside of student populations).

You’re missing 80% of what the pub is for the 20% you have a personal issue with.

I said it saddens me that a physical social place is going extinct and you translate that to me thinking it's bad that people consume less alcohol?

What is this, Twitter? Stop putting words in my mouth.

Reminds me of a WWII training film for American soldiers in Britain, there's a scene about the pub culture, very interesting.

How to Behave in Britain: https://youtu.be/ltVtnCzg9xw?t=228

That's for the better, for me a concept of a place that serves drinks but not food sounds ridiculous and dangerous. And young generation drinks whole lot less.

You're missing Work/Life Balance rather than the pub.

One of the things that have changed quite significantly in our life time is that you can’t drink or be drunk at work anymore.

I worked a decade in the public sector, and some of my older coworkers (they are 55-60) now could tell stories from when the server room was genuinely used to take naps when people needed to sober up a little. And this was everyone from the craftsman workers to the mayor.

It’s sort of how you see a picture from people sitting in a cinema in the 80ies with cigarettes lit, it’s so foreign to most of us that it’s crazy to think that this was the norm a few decades ago.

Obviously more people are going to take their drinking home when the drinking doesn’t start at work, and now that we’ve been through a few lockdowns our habits have changed quite a bit as well.

In the eighties and nineties it was certainly the case that Friday lunchtime was nearly always spent in the pub - other days also, but less frequently so. In one particular project this effectively turned into a four and a half day week, and the expression 'going back to the office to log off / collect my coat' became a running joke. This was software development but in many other industries, particularly creative ones, this was very much the norm. In my experience this started to change mid-late nineties.

As others have commented, the symbiotic bond with the boozer that was ingrained in the culture has largely vanished, and young people in the UK would rather hang out with their friends in other places and ways, and drink far less than their elders did/do.

Although it's the common explanation that young people just don't do that anymore. I think it's one of the symptoms of the fact that younger generations just don't have the disposable cash anymore to go out.

There are also competing activities ie. the growth of the fitness industry. People have made habits of working out at the gym after work. I could never imagine not having a fitness/athletic/martial arts hobby in my life, and thus I reduce drug/alcohol/bad food consumption to optimize for performance in those hobbies.

I don't think it is just the disposable income. As competition has become more global there is far more stress to be at the top or stay at the top which tends toward trying to optimize all sorts of choices.

In my high school years, if you were smart enough you aced everything and that was all. Our valedictorian had a rowdy social life and there were few ideas that you had to show any real skills to the level expected in a local member of industry then, let alone today.

It wasn't even that long ago, in 2011-2012 i worked at a place which "pub lunched" multiple times a week. Hell, our yearly IT budget had its 1st draft written in a bar on a Tuesday morning.

The world has changed but it came to some industries far faster then others. Advertising and Marketing seemed to be the biggest hold outs.

> Advertising and Marketing seemed to be the biggest hold outs.

I'm working in that area on the tech side. Most corporate places these days are dead, soulless paper pushing jobs manned by drones. In contrast, the advertising, marketing and entertainment (movies, music, ...) industry depends on their people not being mindless drones, so they are heavily incentivized to allow their employees whatever they need to get their job done.

Obviously that has led to a number of issues, particularly with sexualized aggression and abuses of power/authority (#metoo being just the tip of the iceberg), so we're seeing some of the freedoms of the holdouts being taken back... but I'm pretty confident the industry as a whole will not be "corporate transformed" any time in the near future.

I remember this, back when I was working in the 90s, I worked with some ex BT engineers, they would go to the pub practically every lunch time. I soon learned to curtail it myself as I found myself coming across as overly aggressive in emails.

After that, I got a job where my mentor was a borderline alcoholic, we were always travelling for work, he would take customers out for long lunches pretty much every day, 3-4 pints was normal, then, in the evenings, he always seemed to know a pub where he could get a lock in, I was hungover a lot of the time.

"Bordline alcoholic..."

Sometimes I'm just impressed by people who can drink that much and hold down a job, especially past the age of 25. Assuming the neighborhood fireworks stop within an hour, I'll get about six hours of sober sleep. I already know tomorrow will be a little tougher. I can't imagine going from lunch to lock-in and then going to work the next day.

> I can't imagine going from lunch to lock-in and then going to work the next day.

For a very long time in history, the pace of work was more tolerable: most in the "upper chain" were people who worked the shit jobs at the beginning of their careers themselves instead of by clueless MBAs who joined management right after university, had utterly no idea what the worker base was doing and only were able to crunch numbers and rule by fear. Also, there usually was no computerized database or other way on which to track efficiency of workers, which means that the expected pace was effectively set by the workers themselves - and they accounted for having had a couple beers the night before, since that was was everyone did, and no one wanted to be the one arsehole that ratted out everyone else to management.

The first change was anything that could be industrialized, where the pace of work was dictated by the machines, which obviously led to (sometimes extremely violent) strikes and literal labor fights. Classic trades and office jobs still ran under the "old order of things" for decades. And then, maybe a decade ago, the age of IT began - now everyone and their dog employs efficiency-gaming at all parts of the chain, and here we have a problem for the mentioned old guard.

Obviously, a part of the "efficiency gains" of the last decades was cutting down on actual laziness or on mind-blowingly complex processes. But the way things are going, I think people will want an "out" to better times in the past - basically, capitalism is once again going to discover it the hard way that people are humans, not machines, and as such need frequent downtime to mentally relax, even if it's just a beer or cigarette breaks.

When you are used to it a couple of pints won’t even phase you. As a consultant I remember going out to have drinks with my coworker around 8pm and going back to the office at 11pm to finish a presentation. It was very much business as usual but to be honest I was basically working all the time when I was not partying. Some of the people there clearly were bordering functional alcoholism but that was part of the culture.

Sometimes I’ll go out to a coffee shop around lunchtime and one of the nearby coffee shops is next door to a pub. By about 1pm on most weekdays that pub is usually packed with people wearing suits (or who were likely wearing suits but removed their jackets). It’s a bit a mystery to me what sort of jobs they have where that is acceptable.

Nobody can get drunk from couple of beers ... especially the colored spring water they sell in the UK.

The beer in the UK is quite strong though compared to Spain where I live now where it's basically all lager.

Where do you live where it is considered really weak?

Eastern Europe. Not that our beer is much stronger but we don't bother to consider it alcohol. It's just something you drink during the day.

I’m definitely at the tired, unmotivated, and imprecise stage after one 5% beer.

I assumed it's estate agents and if London the old school insurance guys like at Lloyd's. Otherwise the back office folks like accountants that no one checks on :)

My first job out of university was with a local news group. The canteen had a bar which was pretty busy throughout the week. It seemed pretty much accepted that if you were a cricket reporter, for example, you’d spend most of the day in a beer tent. We worked in the digital media department watching as the internet ate the classified ads industry, wondering how all this could be sustainable.

Anyway their pension scheme later collapsed.

My first job (in my gap year) in the mid 80s was in the research labs of a major chemical corporation. There was an onsite bar next to the canteen. A pint on a Friday lunchtime was the done thing... then back to working with all sorts of nasty chemicals!

Children of the 60s and 70s were probably the last in the UK that could get away with long lunches, client meetings in the pub and no work Friday's. I worked in IT sales and marketing in my twenties and saw this quite often and it was only until I started working at places where things were more 'agile' that a tee-total culture kicked in.

The reasons are multiple but here are the ones I've noticed are. Compared to my father's generation most women now work and men and more involved with the family, a hangover Saturday/Sunday morning doesn't work. Cost, mortgage/childcare require two salaries, hard to justify a large cost of pub sources alcohol. The cost of property, saving for a deposit creates a habit of no longer going to the pub. We no longer need to go to a social place toget most of our local news or gossip, Facebook/WhatsApp have filled the gap. Every generation seems to be more health focused than the previous.

> Cost, mortgage/childcare require two salaries

I'm not sure if that's healthier.

Most definitely not

Coming from a country with a huge alcoholism problem, I welcome any trend that shows decrease in alcohol consumption.

Now living in England, I'm amazed how people just take their cars to a pub and drive back home like it's nothing. And considering how busy my local pub is, some do it on a daily basis.

> I'm amazed how people just take their cars to a pub and drive back home like it's nothing

In England and Wales people often take their children to pubs. So not everyone's drinking alcohol - many are having food or just non-alcoholic drinks.

If you think someone going to a restaurant or café and driving home isn't madness, then neither is someone going to the pub in England or Wales.

I think I’d rather have slightly inebriated drivers than people letting their kids drive them home.

I mean not all adults in pubs are drinking.

Wait really? For some reason I thought the transit was great in Cities in England… that would seem like the better option, no?

Public transport is pretty good in the UK, but not to the point of being able to live without a car for a large portion of the population. In London, there is the tube and driving in the city is quite dreadful, so I guess that is the exception, but I would say that the UK is pretty car-centric overall.

>there is the tube and driving in the city is quite dreadful

It’s not that bad, at least in Westminster/RBKC. Westminster has super liberal parking policies, so you can park anywhere except TFL red routes without getting your car towed. Traffic is so and so, but the stress of parking is completely eliminated.

The tube? Hot, smelly, crowded. I’d rather sit in my air conditioned car.

Interesting, i thought covid would at least compel the improvement of air circulation/conditioning systems in public transit.

I wish. I occasionally have to take the tube, and it’s awful. The temperatures and humidity can get super high, turning everybody on the train into a sweaty mess.

They may not live in a city. Even tiny villages in the UK will have a pub and some pubs are literally just on their own in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in a small town in eastern England and people would drive from the surrounding villages to go to the pubs there and then drive home after several drinks. Drink driving outside of cities is unfortunately very common.

Transit is great in the cities, but pubs are far more socially important in towns and villages.

My impression was that drink driving is fairly uncommon and is frowned upon socially in the UK these days, obviously there will be exceptions and I can imagine in remote places where the risk of being stopped is very low, this still happens frequently. That said, I live in London so don’t drive regularly so I could be way off the mark, but I’d be surprised if drinking over the limit (>1 pint I guess?) was a common thing.

> Coming from a country with a huge alcoholism problem, I welcome any trend that shows decrease in alcohol consumption.

Indeed, this seems like a healthy progression of things. The dangers of alcohol abuse are now well known and it's disappointing that so many activities still revolve around the use of the substance.

What's at issue here, though, is that there's nothing obvious to replace these types of places for social gathering in common spaces.

In pre-pandemic times I worked from home and to get out a bit during a day I would have a coffee and work from the local pub.

Depending on the time of day I showed up there would always be the regular pensioners starting their first drink of the day around 11:00, then around 12:30-13:00 the lunch crowd from the nearby offices would show up and sometimes after that there would be a birthday event or a funeral wake, then it would quiten down again until 17:00-18:00 when families showed up for dinner, and later than that the drinking crowd would show up and it would become too lively to sit and code.

Pubs in the UK works as family restaurants (with a bar) but they are a place of social gathering, and they cater to all sort of different types of business.

One factor that's important not to overlook is that younger people, especially in developed nations, are drinking much less in recent years, even after the COVID-19 lockdown. [1] It's just not really fashionable anymore. Everyone I know under the age of 25 or so, and (A smaller amount of) older people I know as well who have grown out of thinking being drunk is fun, are looking at it more as a quick way to get fat and sad.

[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/analysis-our-survey-show...

Personally, the primary reason is hangovers take waaaaay too much time after 30

There's no reason hangovers should be any worse in your 30's or 40's. Hangovers are mostly the result of poor drinking habits.

Ha, and what bad drinking habits would those be? The popular answer is "drink water", but I didn't do that when I was young and I didn't have hangovers then. These days if I drink two beers and even twice as much fresh water, I'll be miserable the morning after. Consequently, I don't go to bars anymore and I buy a sixpack at the grocery store maybe two or three times a year.

This is exactly why I quit drinking and have been sober for almost 2 years. I kept finding that one or two beers and I would feel like crap or get headaches the next day. I know about the drink water trick and it didn’t help. So finally gave up drinking and don’t miss it. Also other reasons to quit as other commenters mentioned is the price. Going out for a drink costs a lot of money. Just food and a non alcoholic drink cost me over $20. A couple alcoholic drinks would cost me 1/3 days pay. I would much rather not.

I would guess that this is just because young people have more energy and healing ability, both of which deteriorate with age

Yes, such as drinking to the point of getting drunk.

I thought it was due to me drinking way less ofent and thus losing resistance. Are you sure?

btw I hear this a lot from North American/English speaking parts of the world but less in others. There seems to be more tolerance/less judgement towards drinking alcohol, its seen as an integral part of socializing, almost to a fault in some cultures. I wonder if this is some pre-emptive virtue signaling,since if you break it down, hangovers is largely the result of dehydration and loss of minerals. It might be that as you get older you retain less fluid or something, i do not know, just guessin.

having said that, i can go without drinking. you tend to increase consumption in bursts, social events. it can cause a lot of societal problems (ex. south korea/russia) and combined with tobacco (ex. south korea/japan), its right up there in terms of toxicity with combining cocaine and alcohol (dramatically/needlessly increases toxicity).

One might make the same judgement about cocaine hangovers or any substance for that matter.

> hangovers is largely the result of dehydration

This is mostly a myth.

In my experiences between Asia and Latin America, if you're going to be drinking alot on whatever occasion, it better be with a lot of food. Even Eastern Europe for instance with their famous straight vodka shots have something (In Russian, at least) called 'zakuski' which means 'Something to bite after', which means after each shot you eat a pierogi or whatnot [1]. It really does a lot to dampen the after-effects beyond what water is capable of.

You can get at most bars a full meal for around 5$ or sometimes even less. Cocaine isn't very popular with the locals, again especially the younger ones, as it's caused us a lot of societal problems (Stuff like people who don't even touch it ending up tied up in narco violence chiefly... It's just the worst vibes on top of that).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakuski

> combining cocaine and alcohol (dramatically/needlessly increases toxicity)

Because of cocaethylene? Can't find anything online that makes it clear what the danger is.

Highly neurotoxic and cardiotoxic, actually. [1][2] Don't do that to yourself.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550388/

[2] https://www.cureus.com/articles/73024-cocaethylene-when-coca...

This is common incorrect assumption, it's due to tolerance and consistency of drinking habits, including hydration and liver health.

This seems extremely unlikely to be true, based on personal experience and that of many other people. Sources?

The effects are great (for many but not all), and bars can be nice are if you're drunk, but the cost is just so heavy.

Ever tried getting drunk in an English pub? It's surprisingly difficult.

Name your time and place. Perhaps you’re doing it wrong :)

The beer is both weak and expensive by US standards. I actually like it, you really can sit around drinking all day and not feel like a truck hit you the next.

Try the rough cider instead… you can reliably forget a whole day for under £15.

This made me chuckle

> really can sit around drinking all day

11am to 11pm, 12 hours. Standard drinking rate of 4 pints an hour. 48 pints, and maybe a fish finger sandwich and a bag of pork scratchings to soak it up.

... otherwise known as "going pro"

Monday night at the pub, thats when you see the true pros at work.

The problem is not just that the alcohol is expensive in pubs (it’s actually cheaper than a lot of European countries) but that also the alcohol in the shops is very expensive. I think that is why alcohol use has become so unpopular. Not only is it a less pleasurable drug than others, but it’s actually becoming more expensive than them, even at home

Never been there, I tend to live in countries where the average price of a bottle of ~4-8% beer or a shot of booze is around 80 cents to 2.50 USD though and I am sorry to report the drunkest shit-disturbers in the bars are British, Australian, American and Canadian tourists in that order. I think some of these lads see the price and just go insane on it, but they can't really hold their liquor, and it causes a lot of problems with them thinking they can fight people over the pettiest of reasons (There really isn't a casual bar-fight culture in most parts I hang out around in Latin America), when it often at best just ends them getting kicked out, maybe worse targeted to get robbed at gun or knifepoint on the beach, or violently mobbed on by people having none of it at worst (go home injury or the rare death). Disagreement over the rules of billiards is a consistent one surprisingly, the pockets are marked for certain balls and when you point this out they think you are trying to hustle them or something when the numbers are pretty clearly right on the table.

(Most) Local men don't make enough money to get drunk at the bar, and chances are they have a woman (mom/wife/girlfriend) waiting around to give them a hard time if they do, if they don't they're trying to find exactly that so getting too wasted spoils the mamacita-mission, and a lot of it is economic and cultural relativity for sure. Like there are some pretty heavy drunks out this way but I mostly notice that with expats, especially those who don't speak very good Spanish. It really varies from country to country though (Often when I hang out with Colombians for instance they're drinking straight shots of this stuff called aguardiente and it's HORRIBLY sugary and a guaranteed hangover, no idea how they get used to it, I won't go near it). I think more of an issue for the local binge drinkers is adulterated liquor with weird holographic labels and the occasional mass methanol poisoning [1], actually, you find a bottle of that garbage for about a dollar for 350mL and it's the worst, killed someone I knew in quite a horrible way. Home-made fruit liquor causes a lot of problems too. No idea why people continue to drink that stuff other than a lack of education.

Internationally I notice the trend however is people becoming more health-conscious and I think that's pretty great.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46423180

I have always looked at it as a social activity, than sole reason to be getting drunk.

With my friends, if you wanted to get drunk, it w as s never at a pub, we were too cheap.

We would just drink at home.

In general, people are less outgoing, not specific to pubs.

Look at restaurant closures in your area, retail stores etc... I bet the pub lines up with these

It was always a pricey hobby and wages have stagnated. I think that was the main driver - the rest is post hoc rationalization.

Ditto with smoking.

Also bars got shitty prices these days. Most people pregame before they actually go out so they buy less there bc its too fucking expensive to get drunk out. Seems like prices at bars go up even faster than prices for alcohol retail.

I'm far too cheap to order more than a drink or 2 at bars, but it tends to mean I keep a bottle of something at home which makes it dangerously easy to go too fast/hard

Personally, the whole covid situ, and working from home just taught me to go over to friends places and drink at home rather than some shitty pub with expensive drinks that I don't like.

This sounds more like people going to pubs to get hammered instead of going there to be social. The beer gardens around here are full of people enjoying a cold one. No one goes there to get drunk. Same with the pubs (mostly). Tons of young people there. Maybe we just have a different pub culture on the continent?

How much of a business profit comes from people getting drunk though? One serious drinker might spend as much a small group of people just enjoying a beer or two.

I live in the UK and honestly from what I've seen at least nice beer gardens are doing great, and even many of the regular pubs aren't necessarily doing badly.

I think people do like going out for a drink (and certainly not just to get drunk), rather I think the bigger problem is that its become far too expensive for many.

Adults in the UK drink to get drunk, like Italian 15 year olds. It is different for young adults, who are adopting a more “continental” approach to alcohol.

> younger people, especially in developed nations, are drinking much less in recent years, even after the COVID-19 lockdown. [1] It's just not really fashionable anymore.

and then you link to a 2020 article that analyzes drinking DURING lockdown. Well, of course it's going to be lower during lockdown in the initial phase of covid. What you've said is bloody misleading.

> Everyone I know under the age of 25 or so, and (A smaller amount of) older people I know as well who have grown out of thinking being drunk is fun, are looking at it more as a quick way to get fat and sad.

It's always binary to you people. Drinking moderately can be social and fun, but to you, it's only to get drunk and hammered and fat and sad.

To “you people” doesn’t set a constructive tone.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style and taking swipes at others in HN comments? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot lately. We ban that sort of account, because we're trying for a different sort of discussion here.

You can make your substantive points thoughtfully; please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Clearly and specifically referring to binge drinking here, a major societal problem which I'm glad to see is becoming less of one.

“I don’t drink, thanks. I just do hard drugs.”

Instagram ruined everything.

Pubs now have flower displays with a swing for the gram.

The record low is a part of a long term trend, the numbers have been falling year over year for the last few decades — this headline is somewhat misleading. The pandemic and changing economic environment may hasten their demise, but it has been long coming.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/310723/total-number-of-p...

Sounds like an extremely alarming trend! Why is no-one doing anything? Where are they gonna go to get hammered?

Cannaboids.

13% of the population is on opioids, 6% are on gabaergic/genics, and 17% are on monoamine reuptake inhibitors of some form. There is plenty of room to grow.

I'm trying my best to keep them going.

I live in a semi-rural area and all the local pubs that serve food are overflowing on a weekend, and usually busy on a weeknight.

However, they all have staffing problems, and some have to close part of the week because staff presumably find better work elsewhere.

Couple that with sometimes extortionate business rates and many average pubs in remote areas are simply not viable.

Sounds like they're not paying their staff enough. If they're not having trouble with staffing on busy nights, but are on quiet ones thats a pretty sure sign that they need to raise their pay. On busy nights staff might be okay with the lower pay thanks to tips, but otherwise its likely more profitable for them to go work somewhere else that pays better.

>tips

Barstaff don't get tips in the UK

It's more likely that on quiet nights/days it's simply not cost effective to open. During a weekday a small pub might literally have one or two customers. They're traditionally owner-operated for a reason, and the reason is because the margins don't allow for staff.

Fair point. I'm looking at this from an American point of view, and I forgot that wait staff in the UK get paid actual wages unlike in the US.

> Barstaff don't get tips in the UK.

At least when food comes into it they may do, quite a lot of tips where my brother worked a few years back (pooled and shared between bar & kitchen staff). Nothing like the US though indeed.

Definitely changing that though, esp over last 10 years. Many pubs in London (and increasingly other areas) will put an "optional" 12.5% for service for food, especially if they have a "dining area" off the main bar. It's also increasingly common for pubs to have people asking if you'd like another drink, and charging you 12.5% for the pleasure - this seems to be a lingering effect after covid where you couldn't go to the bar to order.

> On busy nights staff might be okay with the lower pay thanks to tips

You have absolutely no idea about this topic you're commenting on, do you?

It might not be applicable to the UK, as someone else pointed out, but this is absolutely the case in the US. On a good night, a server might make several times more than their hourly wages in tips alone. I've known plenty of people that worked as wait staff at a restaurant that liked the tipping system because thanks to tipping their wages were several times higher than minimum wage. Most of them would have rather had a slow night once in a while rather than give up the tipping because of how much they made thanks to tipping.

Well, sure. But this thread has nothing to do with the US, right?

> this is absolutely the case in the US

How is that relevant to the number of pubs in England and Wales, which is the topic.

Staffing issues are partly a knock-on effect of lockdown and resulting inflation. Benefits sanctions were suspended once lockdowns started, but never properly restarted (the civil service presumably doesn't much enjoy sanctioning people). So for a lot of people, they are getting free money without the obligations to seek work that previously went along with it, and benefits/pensions have also been pinned to inflation whereas private sector wages aren't. It adds up to strong incentives not to restart work again.

I’m an American (New York city) and I originally met most of my friends at the neighborhood coffee shops and bars. Most people don’t go there specifically to caffeinate and get drunk, it’s just the third place (outside work and home) where people go to socialize.

In the UK we have some serious social drinking issues unlike America where a couple of beers is perfectly fine. I prefer going to a bar in the US than a pub here because it's a decent social event.

There isn't sufficient margin in drink to float a pub. The margin is in food (and to an extent, dispensed soft drinks).

Because priority becomes food over drink, people are willing (and able) to drive further for a better pub. Competition increases and you don't need a 'local' for every village or part of town anymore. Less pubs can serve more people because rather than regulars "propping up the bar" 3-5 nights a week for an extended session, you get restaurant-esque table turnover.

This is desirable for landlords - they often live above their pubs - profit from food service means you can shut earlier, you don't have regular fights or trouble from drunk customers and general toil is lower.

But some publicans just won't (or can't) adapt. They won't or can't invest in kitchen and chef. They can't or won't learn how to market and attract new, younger customers. Inflation, energy pricing, COVID shutdowns et al have all just accelerated the demise of the "pub pub".

The old "pub pub" crowd are now well served by the Wetherspoons, who have the advantage of controlling their margins in ways Brewery landlords can't compete with (mass purchasing, pre-prepared food, all their pubs are "new" buildings that don't have the insane maintenance and insurance overheads of a 200+ year old pub building etcetc).

We may be at a record low, but I suspect we'll be setting new lows for some years to come yet.

src: family of publicans from 193Xs ~> 200X. Tried to buy a pub at the 'end' of COVID restrictions.

Wow, this is complete opposite of America. I have run several bars/restaurants and most of our money came from alcohol sales. Food was still profitable, but much tighter margins. A lot more labor goes into the food side of the business too, and we couldn't get away with marking things up 4x like you can with wine.

I think as you get into Michelin-starred places, the name of the chef and the quality of the food is enough to allow you to charge more, and also to cheap out on labor - some of the top restaurants in Chicago collude to pay their cooks $10-12/hr, for example.

I was under the impression that margins on alcohol were huge. At least where I am, proprietors trip over themselves to get alcohol licenses, and those licenses go for hefty premiums.

They are - usually a place will charge 3-4x, sometimes 5-6x depending on the type of liquor and brand, what they paid for the product. You lose a bit to labor if you're making craft cocktails, as there can be a lot of prep behind those. Having a good wine list usually means have a sommelier or wine steward who will get paid a bit more than the rest of the serving staff. But for the most part the labor costs for front-of-house are nothing ($2.13/hr in a lot of states) compared to the cooking staff.

I have a friend who owns a popular bar and a popular coffee shop. He says he makes far more profit off the coffee shop (which has baked goods and sandwiches and salads) than the bar. Might be different in disparate places.

"I wish I had opened a bar" - every restaurant owner I have met.

I'd think those low wages are also partly explained by the desirability of working at a top place (good for your CV and for acquiring actual skills). Pretty similar to how the game industry attracts talent out of proportion to the monetary compensation they pay.

They're 100% explained by that, not just partially. At all of the top-rated restaurants in every city I've cooked in, all the chefs are buddies. It's very common for there to be a tacit agreement to just not pay more than $X, that way they can all keep labor costs down.

do you have any sourced examples for this collusion?

a friend of mine bailed the craft after being offered minimum wage and a 60 hour requirement in the kitchen of a Michelin star restaurant in NYC

It's me, I'm the source. I worked in a lot of those Michelin-starred places in quite a few cities.

I also bailed. The pay and hours were a large part of it. But I did it for years and years.

has there been any attempt to pursue this legally?

I know there have been some higher-profile suits filed against some famous and semi-famous chefs for unpaid wages/stolen tips (Mario Batali, Tom Douglas, Charlie Trotter, a few others), but it's hard to directly challenge collusion like this when it's very unofficial. And a quick way to end your career and get blacklisted from any other high end restaurant.

Are the chefs also the owners or managers?

In a lot of the Michelin places, usually the chef will have a stake in it. To get investors behind them, they usually already have a name and bit of cachet and also worked for other Michelin-starred chefs. The ones I've worked at have varied from "celebrity chef, never actually in the kitchen, everything is actually created by the chef de cuisine and sous" to "micromanaging psycho" to "humble dude who just wants to make good food." So it varies - some manage every aspect of it, but usually there is a dedicated team for the front-of-house and the chef just does the creative side of the food, collaborating usually with his chef de cuisine and sous chefs. CDC and sous handle the day-to-day stuff like ordering, inventory, scheduling.

> The old "pub pub" crowd are now well served by the Wetherspoons, who have the advantage of controlling their margins in ways Brewery landlords can't compete with (mass purchasing, pre-prepared food, all their pubs are "new" buildings that don't have the insane maintenance and insurance overheads of a 200+ year old pub building etcetc).

Bit untrue on your last statement. Wetherspoons have a habit of occupying traditional/landmark buildings. For all the negative they do against the independent pub trade by outpricing with their brewery deals they do a cracking job in preservation by using & maintaining old buildings that would otherwise go to ruin.

Just in Glasgow for example you've got The Counting House (George Square) which was an old premises of the Bank Of Scotland in the late 19th century and The Crystal Palace also built in the 19th century which houses one of the oldest lift/elevator installations in the UK.

whetherspoons don't have "habits", they have corporate strategies. If they think they need a marquee building in a given area (typically to achieve a higher degree of brand acceptance, or to disguise), they'll occupy an old one; if they don't, they'll happily go for a recent build. They don't have values or habits, they are only interested in what makes them money.

In my neck of the woods (NW England), most Wetherspoons are in new buildings, except in the city centre. Not that it makes any difference to me: I have not stepped in one since it became very clear in 2016 that the owner is a racist piece of work.

> There isn't sufficient margin in drink to float a pub. The margin is in food (and to an extent, dispensed soft drinks).

In the US, the exact opposite is true. Alcohol sales are where the money is made (and yes, soft drink sales, but there's usually far less of that in an actual bar.) Food has nowhere near the profit margin. Multiple restaurant owners have told me this for years.

Why is it the opposite in the UK?

The food in many of these pubs is of very low quality and is designed to be quickly prepared (reheated) at scale with no complex steps involved. After a short time in the UK you can quickly tell what sort of food you can expect in a given pub, so I think most Brits know what they're getting. Personally, I think this (plus the fact that a large amount of the population take pride in enjoying shit food) give the UK a bad reputation re food.

And you'd actually be surprised how much soft drinks are served in pubs. They're very low wastage - so if your company budgets that X% will be lost for some reason, you'll very likely undershoot that and have only X/2% wasted. Additionally you can adjust the syrup/carbonated water mix so that your margins for each serving are higher. The dodgy pub I worked at as a student frequently used soft drinks as a way to balance stock in case of wastage (or in the case of a corrupt assistant manager, theft). Towards the end of a given stock-keeping period (monthly?) we'd often be told something like "Tennent's is down, ring it up in the tills as 3 small diet cokes" - meaning that there is less of a given beer in the stock room than expected when accounting for how much we ordered and how much we sold, and to correct for this we'd use take advantage of the surplus of coke stock (after a price adjustment) to try to counteract this. God help you if anyone asked for a receipt and accused you of swindling them ...

Why on earth would you do this rather than expensing the missing beer and trying to figure out why it happened? I.e. who is walking out the back door with it?

The people doing this are clearly getting one over on the owners. It's common for pub employees to swindle the owner.

We weren’t swindling anyone :-) The manager of the pub (or I guess the licensee?) was the one telling us to do this. And the reason they’d do this is because the pub was part of a group of pubs, and there were incentives for the managers to hit wastage targets. So if there was a shortfall in some beer (like some somehow wasn’t usable, or there was a fuckup when switching a keg that caused the first 5 pints or so to be pure foam, or on a busy night on a big round you’d incorrectly ring something up without noticing) they’d try to recover that this way.

There wasn’t much theft that I was aware of, other than one assistant manager (who was constantly accusing us of stealing) was caught red handed stealing stock, but that was whisky or rum which wasn’t part of this iirc (when entire bottle goes missing, that really sticks out - very stupid man)

See my other comment, there was for some reason an incentive to NOT account for this. It seems stupid now that I’m out in the real world, but when you’re making £5/hour:

- you don’t really feel empowered to challenge this sort of thing

- stock or till shortfalls of small amounts like £20 that are threatened to come out of your paycheque feel much more serious than they were, especially when you’re a student in an expensive city and that £20 feeds you for a week

- the reason it happened is often known, there’s just a reluctance to account for it correctly. We are taking about very small amounts here

Plenty of pubs competing with each other, and the pub culture is one of sitting and drinking slowly. A US bar is to a pub what McDonald's is to a restaurant - a very different business model that relies on pushing people through quickly.

I’m not sure what US bars you’ve been to, but I definitely haven’t seen anywhere near that level of difference to a pub in the UK. There’s often more of a focus on food and meals in a pub than a typical bar that’s branded as a bar, but both seem to encourage longer visits, pubs slightly more so.

It's not. I'm not sure where OP got that idea from. The margin is in alcohol in the UK too, in pubs but also in restaurants.

Having invested in this business before, the margin is entirely in alcohol. Typical drink costs <50p and sold for >20x. Food has nowhere near those margins given the labor and materials required.

Not saying I don't believe you but why would a Brit leave out the 'u' in labour?

Maybe adapting to internationalized (American at this point) English.

Also, what they say is what I’ve heard anecdotally several times and it makes sense when comparing even retail prices vs per drink prices.

One obvious theory is that 'tamade' never learned British English; the username appears to be Chinese.

I doubt you're required to be a British national in order to invest in British pubs.

Tamade doesn’t sound in anyway like a Chinese username (maybe Japanese phonetically, but that could easily be a coincidence), but I would let them speak for themselves.

> Tamade doesn’t sound in anyway like a Chinese username

Context is pretty much everything; the only Chinese username I can more or less reel off from memory is '基妮真特么老油条... sabibibi', and I may be forgetting parts of it, but certainly there's plenty of swearing.

It is Chinese: https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary....

seanmcdirmid surely knows that; I assumed he was saying it was unlikely to be used as a username. But I don't know why that would be.

Ah, ok then. To me it looks like “your mom’s” and then cutoff.

> Maybe adapting to internationalized (American at this point) English.

I suggest that in the highly unlikely event this is true that we (the rest of the properly educated British) hunt this person down and dispose of them. After imposing a number of spelling tests first, of course.

As an expat Brit who has been living with ESL speakers for over a decade and gotten sloppy on many of these things, some part of me lives in constant fear of exactly this eventuality.

Ain't been caught yet tho

We are watching…

A bit OT but American English is becoming very popular over here in the UK. It's very common to see z instead of s in words for example. I wouldn't be surprised to see the u dropped at all.

Most “American” spelling came from Britain originally.

Soccer for example is English slang from back when.

An abbreviation of “association football”.

"z" has been a valid alternative to "s" since I was a boy (and I can no longer claim to be a spring chicken).

What I have noticed more of is children saying "zee" instead of "zed". I beat those children and they come to realise that they deserve it.

More people in the world say “zee” than “zed”. I’m surprised to hear a British person wants to sound like they’re French. (I’m just kidding as I hope you are about beating children)

Thanks to India, more people in the world say "w" like "v" but I feel safe knowing that Indians have a better accent and better spelling than anyone in North America, and I would never joke about anything this serious.

;-)

Are you sure? I think they say zed in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. That’s quite a few English speakers.

Canada, NZ, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria...

From [1]:

> Population > 2018 estimate > 1,352,642,280

> Official languages > Hindi > English

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

You do realize that a minority of people in India speak English, right?

As a starting point, this source lists about 128 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

You've given a figure that is around a third of the entire population of the United States, so I think I'm on safe ground, even taking into account the Indian government's well known inability at accurate record taking, but thanks for the list, Pakistan has "187,758,480" under English speakers. No chance of them saying "zee".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31983828

Whatever the internet tells you about what is "standard"... as someone who has spent his life in New Zealand, I can assure you the majority of under-30s usually use "zee". "Zed" is on its way out.

It probably started with the popularity things like Sesame Street and Dragon Ball Z (Dragon Ball Zee).

However, interestingly, the one time everyone uses "zed" is when we acronymise the country name -- NZ, or N-Zed.

Why add another consonant to the name of a consonant? Literally the only letter that's like that.

Americans and the British (and a couple billion other people) share a language that is spelled like shit. We should steal simplifications from each other as much as possible.

I'm an American, but I use "zed" over "zee" in some contexts (such as ham radio) because "zee" is too easily confusable with the other letters it rhymes with: bee, see, dee, gee, pee, tee. It's definitely an advantage. And you don't have to drop into NATO phonetic with its multiple syllables per letter.

I think you missed a few, and it's not just consonants:

Ay, see, ef, jee, aitch, aye, jay, kay, oh, kyuu, yuu, double-yuu, eks, why?, zed.

It's because the English alphabet is not a phonetic lettering system. If I were American I'd:

a) start saying "t" in the middle of a word as a "t" instead of a "d", and

b) vastly improve the standard of my spelling and those around me

before telling anyone, especially British people, that words shouldn't be spelt "like shit".

Personally, I'm with the Arguments against reform section of Wikipedia[1]:

> English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed many words from non-Germanic languages, and the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This sometimes gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Even if their pronunciation has strayed from the original pronunciation, the spelling is a record of the phoneme.

Which is how I can usually guess the correct pronunciation and meaning of an unfamiliar word while I see highly educated Americans butcher the pronunciation of anything outside the common vernacular. These "simplifications" are doing anything but.

However:

> Another criticism is that a reform may favor one dialect or pronunciation over others, creating a standard language

If I could force North Americans to speak better then I might be persuaded.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

Edit: an important point was missed!

> If I were American I'd:

> a) start saying "t" in the middle of a word as a "t" instead of a "d"

Americans do not have a distinction between intervocalic /t/ and intervocalic /d/. (Though you have to be careful - that analysis requires you to commit to a "syllabic /n/" model of words like "kitten".)

But while /t/ and /d/ are pronounced identically in that context, you can't say that /t/ is being pronounced "as /d/". They are both flapped, which is a sound just as distinct from [d] as it is from [t].

Budder.

I grew up here in the US saying "zee". It's only now, in my wiser years, that I'm realizing the obvious: with "bee", "cee", and "dee" (amongst others) all sounding similar-ish already that we really ought to embrace "zed" for clarity.

Or we could all memorize something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet, I guess.

'colour' isn't a valid CSS property, and 'serialisation' is inconsistent within a codebase written by Americans.

Over time it's natural to drift towards en-US spellings when conversing online, even with a spellchecker.

Never said I was a Brit :P In fact, a big chunk of UK pubs are owned by global PE funds.

Having lived and grown up in this business (above a pub since a child) -- you're right.

Doesn't it depend on the absolute amount of profit per customer per hour?

For instance, if a person goes out and has 3 beers over two hours at $6 each, say the profit is $5 per beer or $15.

Instead if that person comes in and orders a meal for $30, with a 50% margin, he's made the same amount and likely didn't stay as long. Basically food is more absolute profit per customer per hour. And you get the benefit of not dealing with drunk people. That's why they they often don't let you take a table if you're not ordering food.

A 50% margin on a meal is enormous. Expect single digits. Food requires someone to cook it, a lot more storage, a lot more tools and dishes and what not.

I've worked in serval bar kitchens where the food was a loss leader and basically only there to allow the business to more easily aquire a liquor license.

Fair enough. The customer may order some soft-drinks or alcohol drinks at the bar. Also I hear deserts are high margin. My point is that relative margin is not the thing you would want to optimize on. You'd want to maximize profit per customer per hour.

His point still stands. Your original estimate of the margin was just not realistic.

This obviously varies depending on many factors, but when you factor in labor, ingredients, equipment etc. 10% is a good margin on food. In your hypothetical example the customer who came in, had a meal and nothing else, and then left earned the pub $3 in profit. Someone who has a few drinks in the same amount of time will usually generate more profit.

That's how it used to be, but from what I understand, cheap alcohol from supermarkets has shrunk volumes to levels where overall profits are thinner than in food.

That's not the case; the vast majority of a pub's margin still comes from alcohol. GP comment is just wrong.

Yeah no idea what that part is about. The margins are absolutely in the alcohol, and the food is to get you to spend longer sitting there drinking with friends.

Src: Ran a bar for 4 years.

Some pubs successfully transition into a sort of trendy, highly publicized concept restaurant which charges a premium for food and essentially attracts well off restaurant customers who tend to drink more than average. I think that might be the model he had in mind. Most pubs won't be able to do this however as the market for it is only so big and it will tend to alienate their regular customer base.

And a good kitchen is 40% of the total floor area of a restaurant.

Not that I can claim to understand the business model at all, but usually people that buy food are buying drinks too. You ought to happily make a loss on food if it is guaranteed to be exceeded by increased drink sales.

This is so strange, and the exact opposite of America. In America margins on drink are 100-200%+ while margins on food are much less when you take into account untipped workers fixing it. It must be the tipping difference, since bartenders are basically free labor in America.

It sounds strange because it's just false. The vast majority of the margin in UK pubs comes from alcohol sales. I've worked and invested in the industry and it would be a very very unusual pub where this was not the case.

As an aside, this is classic HN: very authoritative sounding comment, voted right to the top, spouting complete nonsense.

There does need to be a little nuance though, since the vast majority of pub owners are actually on a wet lease then the pub itself doesn't get all of the margin, the breweries normally take 20-25% of that margin.

So an example from a recent wholesale catalogue, 1 30L keg which you can probably sell 58 pints out of will cost around £150 so that gets your cost price of around £2.58 / plus VAT and beer duty and you're up to cost price of over £3.00 / pint

So margins are variable but as you can see if you want to sell at around the average price around the country which is £4 / pint then you're not talking about a massive margin.

The reason why food is a popular option for bar owners is that the breweries don't take any of the margin so the owner takes all the profit from food sales, plus in many ways, the food is extra income from people that would be taking up the space to drink too.

Yeah, I was thinking the same. A large proportion of uk pubs are leased by the likes of Star (Heineken), Punch, Enterprise etc, and they really do screw their landlords on alcohol ties. Free houses basically procure alcohol at 1/2 the price. Food GP is much better in these pubs as a result.

This is a fair point — I have never been involved with, nor really patronised, tied houses, so I know less about the economics of them. The alcohol is still far more profitable than the food regardless; it's just that in a tied house a significant chunk of that profit is being taken by the pub company.

> The margin is in food

Interesting, I've always been told than margin was in alcohol (esp. in high end restaurants).

Restaurants and pubs, despite recent convergence, are in different markets. Restaurants rely on turnover, pubs on repeated orders.

Repeated orders are turnover. Same thing.

My local pub does the best burgers I've ever eaten. Absolutely phenomenal. Stone baked pizzas as well.

I'd go there for food with my partner, say a Sunday lunch, but I'd never go there just to drink. I can't think of anything more boring.

Note “landlord” doesn’t mean the same thing it does in the US, it means the person who actively operates the pub.

Do they not own the land and building?

Traditionally they did but it’s not required. It’s like if you called property managers landlords whether or not they actually are one.

Not necessarily. A pub landlord and a property landlord are completely separate concepts. Of course the same person might be both.

Not any more, the majority are owned by the brewery groups and leased to the landlords.

If you see an independent pub in the UK it will be labelled as a 'Free House' that means it is independent of a brewery and can sell any beers it likes.

Even pubs that are free of tie don't necessarily own the land/building, they'll lease it from a property company (usually one specialising the hospitality).

I would imagine that’s raised prices by a lot then

In NSW (a state in Australia) a bar/pub is often just an excuse for a poker machine license, with all the actual revenue coming from gambling

Strange. In the USA, many restaurants barely break even on food and make up their profit on alcohol drinks. They live and die by their liquor license. Is it because they go for pricier drinks in the states?

A lot has to do with alcohol prices outside pubs, i.e. supermarkets and shops, as well as taxation levels.

I work in post 16 education. The number of young adults who have never had a drink is crazy high. A lot of them just don't drink, don't go out much and haven't ever been to a pub.

Covid. Lock down. Being fucking skint. Not having access to a car or bus service (remember the old days when a mate would drive 7 or 8 of you and your mates to a local for a skin full? Doesn't happen any more)

As a young adult I just don't see drink as much fun to be quite honest.

" There isn't sufficient margin in drink to float a pub. The margin is in food (and to an extent, dispensed soft drinks)."

Lol. Try a simple experiment. 1) Pour me a beer. 2) Make me a steak dinner. Task: Find out which takes an entire cooking staff, dish washers, grills, linens, produce, deep freezers, meat bills, gas bills, .... OH! Medium rare please.

I wonder how much on an effect prices have in this.

It's gotten more and more expensive to go out drinking, while the prices for alcohol haven't risen commensurately in my area. When you're paying almost the cost of a bottle of cheap rum for a single drink, suddenly drinking at home starts to make a lot more sense. Why spend $20 on a drink when you can for the same money buy a bottle of cheap alcohol, some mixers and snacks and have yourself and your friends a merry night?

On a side note, this made me wonder why prices on alcohol haven't gone up all that much, despite the recent inflation. Most of the prices for alcohol at my nearby grocery store are the same as they were last year and the year before.

More people are at their homes playing video games, using streaming platforms, and going online to shop for alcohol or food. Less people are wanting to leave their homes, especially during gas inflation and other things.

Gas inflation? Aren't most pubs in the UK walkable (vs say, US bars)?

Indeed many are and in the age of working from home I expect many neighbourhood pubs to do well.

We're certainly going more often than before.

It's also a great way to get to know your neighbors and build community.

A location only reachable by car would be a suboptimal choice for any establishment mainly selling alcoholic beverages.

You just described America.

Suboptimal?

Not necessarily. In cities people tend to be disparately located so usually ends up via public transport. In small towns the local pub can be a 30 minute walk away or a 30 minute taxi away depending on how many of them have closed down and the spread of the car-focused structure of some towns.

The petrol/gas inflation, plus the incursion of Uber, really screwed the prices of the taxis up as well.

They mean natural gas, the stuff you burn in the kitchen to heat a pot. Not gasoline.

That's a good point.

Not only people tend to drink less nowadays but also when people mention these kinds of development (like movie theater decline and so on), they forget to mention all of these are just different kinds of entertainment.

And there has never been so many ways to entertain oneself so the competition is stiff.

Many pubs in England are operating since XIII - XIV centuries. It's a living history. Would be sad to see them gone.

It's only more visible than people being Airbnb-d out of their native towns.

We should impose mandatory-minimums for alcohol consumption. I think 10 drinks/wk should do it.

I've been going to pubs in Wales and England since 1977. I've noticed the customers seem to be older during the last 10 years. I suspect it is related to much social interaction moving to the internet.

In any case, I wonder how this change has affected the sale of beer & ale.

Isn't that just you are getting older and thus more likely to go to pubs where people are older?

Brilliant, but I already thought about that and doubt that it is the case.

Furthermore, I refuse to admit that I am getting older.

Cheers

> Furthermore, I refuse to admit that I am getting older.

Cool! We don't get many undead on HN. Welcome!

Meanwhile, a third of the fish and chip shops in Britain are expected to close as a result of price hikes and embargoes from Russia/Ukraine. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/02/ukraine-wars...

Its a sad time for the UK.

Not as sad as it is for Ukraine.

I don't really care for the pub. But if the chippy dies then that's a tragedy.

It's almost as if tourists and workers are the lifeblood of a pub, and when you physically bar (hehe) those people from entering because of a peculiar collection of organic material going around, it is the pub that is squeezed to death between the landlord and the non-existent customer

The decline in pubs began long before the pandemic.

This is a trend that has been steadily continuing for at least 20 years

https://www.statista.com/statistics/310723/total-number-of-p...

Imho alcohol is historically way too prominent in UK culture so its a relief to learn that people are finally finding something else to do with their time

edit: 30 year trend in this paper: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

I thought exactly the same as someone from the UK as well. Far too much literal dependency on alcohol and football.

Yeah, part of the issue is that historically we were wildly over-saturated with pubs due to the drinking culture, and as that's changed (along with the related issue of taxes on alcohol having increased a lot) there's just far less demand for somewhere to drink. My parents used to occasionally visit a village near them in Essex famous for having a dozen pubs along the tiny high street... crazy.

This is the country that upon being introduced to spirits for the first time promptly went into an alcoholic frenzy where people drunk themselves to death in large numbers. It is strange that England is the only country I can think of without any national spirits of its own though...

There is a massive alcoholism, binge drinking, and future fatty liver disease problem building in Britain. Massive. It causes me great concern from afar, I am watching family and friends whose only social outlet is to go and get hammered in the pub.

I loved my local (York, 1980s) and I loved being in the snug, and I love the friendlyness of a local, but you would have to be daft to ignore the massive, huge future cost/consequence of a culture which thinks socialising == booze

Here in Australia its a smaller problem. The big one is buying booze from the bottle shop to drink at home. It hits some people very hard, but its not quite the same as promiscuous group/peer pressure drinking in the pub like in the UK. Youth binge drinking is a life-long consequence activity.

Britain has been here before. Beer was watered down at the turn of the 19th century and Hogarth's "gin lane" is a parody of a real problem, the relatively cheap highly potent dutch jenever (gin) which was leaking into british society. Tax is now actively used as back pressure on alcohol consumption, just as for sugar. It's divisive of course. So was taxes on smoking.

Preloading. Shooters. Happy hour. Last orders. This is going to be why kids die young in the next 40-50 years.

Plus, the public spaces after closing time are a cesspit.

Coming from the Younger Generation:

A lot of my peers don't drink. If they do drink, it's very uncommon they have more than one or two drinks at a time, sparingly. There's a definite shift. Multiple of my peers have cited their parents' heavy drinking and the result as a reason why they're choosing to go sober, which I can respect at one level.

That isn't to say I don't have binge drinking colleagues. Oh boy do I. I asked a longtime friend of mine how he handles his work (primarily onsite IT support) and he didn't drop a beat when he responded "Alcohol." Alcoholism has become the crutch to hold up some of the frontline support folks because of lack of staffing, lack of training, lack of everything.

Really glad to get this perspective. My ground position tends to "the kids are alright" but I have increasingly worried for this problem, it's not true.

It’s amazing to hear these stats and then drive around England and be astonished how many pubs there are. On high streets, town centers, neighborhoods, etc. Just think how many there were!

I love pub culture and always look forward to a bitter when traveling to the UK.

There is still even at current levels something like 1 pub for every 1,600 residents in the country.

There's a few states in the USA with similar numbers but most every state is far below. And if you were to take the entire country it would be far below the UK numbers.

https://www.eater.com/2013/5/29/6428463/here-are-the-states-...

It‘s the same here in Germany. Many „Kneipen“ have closed. I am thinking that low income people cannot afford to pay 3.50 Euros for a beer anymore. Thirty years ago low income meant you were able to go to a kneipe 2-3 times a week and drink a couple of beer. These days low income people who like to drink sit on benches in front of so called „Spätis“ (something like a mini supermarket) and get a cold beer for a Euro. These people cannot affort to spend 3x3.50 Euros a day.

So first the low income jobs pay less, and then there are cheaper alternatives to German pubs.

I'd be curious if the loss of social cohesion/connection offsets the reduction of alcohol (if that really occurs) - does dementia rise in small villages that lose pubs - or does it fall?

Curious too about trade off of increased health but wrt isolation: in small villages / rural areas, the community is more tight-knit generally - you get more social isolation in urban areas, particularly for older folks.

There was a recent paper done on social isolation in the UK - but heres one for the usa: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/

In the younger generation, people are not so much interested in drinking alcohol. Many prefer to relax with cannabis, but it is illegal for "recreational" purposes. So going to pub, then going somewhere to smoke, then coming back to pub was just tedious and risky. Especially that police likes to harass people minding their own business and if they are from ethnic minorities. That combined with the cost of living crisis, means it's cheaper and more comfortable to meet at ones home or somewhere in the park.

"...adding to the existing problems of price rises and waning consumer demand"

Not remotely possible that people could be being put off by gouging prices, is it?

My local pub/club used to do shots at £2.50 They are now £3.50[1]

I walked in a couple of weeks ago, price of a pint was up from £5 to £5.50 - 10% instant jump, which is pretty bloody incredible.

It does sadden me to watch good pubs being destroyed to build more houses. It's always houses innit.

[1] you can get a full bottle of cheapo spirits for about £10 at the supermarket.

It would be interesting to compare the number of pubs with the total number of establishments that cater to eating and drinking, e.g. including cafes, restaurants, night clubs, etc.

Reminds me of those developers, which demolished a grade II listed pub without planning permission.

Let's just say it didn't turn out well for them[1].

That, at least, was one pub, which could be saved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton_Tavern,_Kilburn

In the TV series 'Escape to the Country', every episode it seems one of the houses is a converted pub.

At the same time, each couple wants to live in a village with a pub. A romantic notion I'm sure, but it seems to signal that some folks at least still value them.

A big chunk of UK pubs are owned by global private equity shops. No surprise that with PE consolidation comes so-called synergies-- might explain why pub numbers are dwindling.

I am decidedly middle aged and don't mind a drink but still see little reason to "hang out" at a pub as was once common.

I don't stay at home all the time but when I go out it is for an experience and not "just chilling". And so the pub is again a long way down the list of things I'd rather be doing.

The pub experience seems to not elevate itself enough to be worth leaving home for and yet, if it was a more "elevated experience" it wouldn't be classed as a pub anymore.

Maybe pubs are simply becoming something else more entertaining to compete in the attention economy?

EDIT: removed wordy pros/cons list that made little point

Don’t the kids (edit: under 30s lol) drink at home, do some drugs, then go straight to the clubs, bypassing the pubs entirely?

Judging from all the youngsters at work a ton of them barely drink at all, let alone do anything beyond that apart from - maybe - the odd joint. They're all much less hedonistic than the older folks.

The cost is just too high, simple as.

A pint in most pubs is like 30 mins to an hour of work at minimum wage.

You can drink it faster than you can earn it.

Casual dining grew. I know its not the same. But its not like "nobody is going out any more".

I’m sure mandatory shutdowns Accelerated this quite a bit.

Bars and Pubs are a very “boomer” sorta place imo. Personally I do like going to them sometimes, but the people there are generally older. The younger groups are either there with work buddies or for some event, or are tourists. Notable exception are clubs, which are still dominated by the young.

The ones that do well today IMO are the ones that experiment with their food offerings. Instead of the standard fare (greasy fries, burgers etc) they offer legitimately good food and vegetarian/vegan options and salads/tacos.

I think its fine. Beers/Ales are worse health wise than the more refined liquors. These establishments just need to change to reflect the tastes of their clientele.

The other day I was listening to Raoul speak on Real Vision, and apart from his weird angle that crypto will survive this cycle (it wont), he mentions demographic time bomb that is about to hit our Western economy.

The basic gist is that baby boomers will drastically curtail their spending by 60% because of the retirement pension is broken. It is essentially a ponzi scheme that will not be able to pay out everybody without huge erosion to currency and its literally the last thing a world reserve currency like US is going to want (a hegemony is only as good as its status as a world reserve currency). so without a sound pension/retirement guarantee, the only way to hedge against future grey swan is to retain capital as much as possible by curtailing spending. This is similar to what happened to in Japan, they would drastically cut spending while increasing savings following the '89 asset bubble brust, followed by deflation. Now the situation is getting out of hand due to supply chain and energy supply issues but eventually the belief is that price inflation post-pandemic will not last. For example, the watch collectibles market appears to be showing signs of stress, as market values of previously inflated (on purpose?) watches have begun to come down in price as buyers tighten their wallets. The JM gold green dial daytona is a good example of the asset bubble. The first market usually to lead deflationary events is the luxury goods section, followed by mainstream consumer goods that simply cannot find enough buyers at the current inflated price.

Taking this a bit further then, there is a huge looming crisis to all sectors of the consumer/leisure economy. Pubs I think are on the decline as a result of inflation and warning signs of further curtailment of spending. This is a very nasty situation to be in because in the past we've been able to swing out of crisis by simply printing money and keeping the consumption rate constant, central banks simply have exhausted their monetary velocity, and could easily stand to lose control of the situation leading to Japan's near 40 year stagnation.

The common belief about grey/black swans is a zealous/elastic band like reaction the remotest idea that it could happen here. anti-fragile or not, a multi-decade change in consumption will set a country back for decades.

Perhaps it is this weakness that Putin saw, and EU's reliance on it's energy/commodities, that he chose to gamble on what he saw as a looming demographic crisis on his end (number of young males available for conscript has peaked and is on the decline). Unlike technologically advanced militaries like EU/US which can absorb this demographic decline, Russia's security guarantees besides its nuclear deterence is largely on numbers. For this reason I believe that Xi is going to emulate Putin to a certain degree in the Taiwan strait.

The US is in a better situation, but it also faces a decline in its population and must continue to increase immigration, one that it is increasingly unwilling to do as populism demand rise as cost of living increases.

We are in unprecedented territory now and the content of this article reads familiar to what we've seen in previous downturns, except that we have a huge monetary excess debt from '08 money print frenzy.

I am not convinced the US hegemony will go away any time soon but I am wary as to whether we are going through what South America did up until 90s, a series of populism that swung the country to authoritarianism and ugliness that rose from that.

This is the connections I made after reading this article and looking at consumption trends in other sectors.

Ja it will come back. It’s a protocol. Nothing about the protocol(s) are broken. If you haven’t been around long enough it looks bleak, but it’s all happened before, multiple times. Paul is right about the future, but his timing might be off.

Eh... Good thing? As someone who does not have the genes to produce ADH2, I can never appreciate alcohol or the euphoria of getting tipsy. Employees in my previous startups in SF openly stocked and drank lots of liquor, which made me uneasy too. It was also very frustrating that engineers in Dropbox of early days used to socialize and design their systems in noisy bars over hard liquor.

So, because you yourself get no joy from alcohol, it frustrates you and makes you "uneasy" to see any situation where others do? Consequently, anything that forces them to consume much less is a good thing? Why? Why should others' personal pleasure bother you in the first place? I comment because this is a sadly selfish attitude that's far too common among many people about many things.

My bad. I was venting indeed

The last point is fair though. I love a good night out at a nice pub, but I'd hate trying to design a system in one!

It's like someone born with no legs being upset and disturbed that people enjoy jogging.

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