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"A fag and a pint is a man's right," the Sun half-rhymed in 2004 when health secretary John Reid, a former 60-a-day man, proposed banning smoking in pubs that served food. But when the ban eventually came in—two years later in Scotland and three years later in England—it affected all pubs. In both countries, pubs that had previously been closing at the rate of a few hundred a year were now shutting at more like a thousand. Tellingly, in both countries, pub numbers took around the same time to fall off the cliff: about 15 months. So, there can't be any argument: banning smoking in pubs has driven people away. Right?The Campaign for Real Ale, which lobbies for keeping proper pubs open, is ambivalent about it. "I think it's probably too soon to know the effect it's had," Tom Stainer, CAMRA's head of communications, says. "It depends massively on who you're talking to… there's anecdotal evidence all over the place."
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If, like me, you spent your formative years painting your parents' front porch with vomit after a night's drinking at a chain that's replicated from Kingston to Durham, you might think you know the answer.In the 1990s and early 2000s—as alcopops took hold and the pub industry looked for a way to appeal to the cast of Coupling rather than the Men Behaving Badly crowd—the high street pub exploded onto the scene. Brands like All Bar One and O'Neill's emerged to cater for legal teenagers and people in their twenties. They opened airy, well-lit pubs with room for hundreds of drinkers to draw in young people turned off by the cramped old boozer down the road.And then—going after a slightly different crowd but still identikit—there's the big daddy of them all, JD Wetherspoon, which has more than 900 pubs across the UK and is growing faster all the time. It took 15 years for Wetherspoon to open its first hundred pubs; the latest hundred, by contrast, have been opened in the last four years. Surely this unstoppable rise must have come at the expense of the traditional pub?
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"What is the bloody point?" Paul Salvatori, landlord of The Aviator in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire cried out. Paul had put on a live music night to boost his earnings, which had worked, pulling in an extra £700 [$1050]. But his profit came to a grand total of £3.95 [$6]. The pub owner, "pubco" giant Enterprise Inns, pocketed £312 [$470] for the beer. "When you put on a promotion… all you're doing is creating extra revenue for them," he told me.Paul's story has been repeated to me up and down the country over the five years I've been writing about the pub industry. Landlord after landlord has come forward to tell me that their pubco owner is charging them extortionate amounts for beer, refusing to invest in the pub and playing hardball, or dirty, in negotiations.Take The Three Tuns in Tamworth, also owned by Enterprise Inns—the back wall of the pub fell into a canal; Enterprise allegedly refused a rent reduction but "offered us some posters and banners."
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Things have gotten worse since the 2008 financial crisis. When money was cheap, big pub owners borrowed billions of pounds to expand their empires. When the crisis struck, however, their businesses were on a downturn and new money to replace their existing debt was much harder to come by.
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If the critics are right and pubcos are driving pubs into the ground, why the suicidal business model? Aren't changing social and market conditions more to blame?Cost of a pint in a pub: £3.50 [$5.30], give or take, depending which part of the country you're in. Cost of a tin from the corner shop: approx £1. At home you can play FIFA. In the pub you can watch Sky Sports News go round and round with the sound off.
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