How does the off-trade do it?

There needs to be wider recognition that supermarkets are far worse offenders than pubs for discounting drinks. Adam Withrington reports.

Reports last week suggested that the price of lager in the off-trade was set to be slashed by 10 per cent in the run-up to Christmas. Retailers estimated that a 24 pack of lager could now sell for as little as £7.99. That is £1 for three cans.

There have been some bad promotions in the on-trade. There still are - letting people pay £10 for entry and then allowing them to drink for free all night is hardly impressive. But there can't be too many promotions in pubs and bars offering for three drinks for a quid. And the feeling among many licensees is that this booze is consumed at home before people stumble out to the pub - which then bears the brunt of the blame for their drunken behaviour.

And yet this news from the off-trade has received very little publicity from the national newspapers, which need little invitation to jump on the anti-binge-drinking bandwagon and to point the finger at pubs and bars for their cut-price promotions.

So what is answer? Who's to blame? Do consumers really get tanked up on cheap supermarket booze before they go out? There is anecdotal evidence but many in the off-trade would say that this type of behaviour is the preserve of students. Others say that all the cheap supermarket deals do is make the art of getting "tanked up" that bit easier.

But it isn't really fair when senior police officers go on programmes like Panorama and shift the blame completely to the on-trade, as Chief Constable Stephen Green of Nottinghamshire police did in June. In the entire programme not one mention was made of any off-trade contribution to the problem of irresponsible drinking.

The Home Office's summer crackdown on irresponsible retailers (both on- and off-trade) led to 23,570 visits to on-licensed premises. Only four per cent of those visited were found to have caused an offence. Yet it is the on-trade that is widely vilified. Through this summer crackdown and in its Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy, the government says it is targeting the off-trade as well. But it doesn't seem like that. Coverage in the national media is totally pub-centric. The national media is heavily responsible for making licensees feel persecuted. Why is this?

Mark Hastings, director of communications for the British Beer & Pub Association, believes the answer, sadly, is quite simple. "No journalist is really going to get excited by writing about supermarkets," he point out. "They do get excited by pubs though - like everybody does."

Maybe national newspapers simply see pubs stories as a good opportunity for a negative angle and supermarket stories as an opportunity for a positive one. Whatever the reasons, it is quite simply not fair on pubs. They are now directly competing against supermarkets on the high street. With the advent of big out-of-town supermarkets has come the opening of smaller city centre versions, like Sainsburys Local and Tesco Metro. Each of these is equipped with chiller cabinets, selling beer to the masses.

At the same time more of the old-fashioned corner shops are being replaced by savvy independent operators who are themselves installing chiller cabinets and selling beer at basement prices.

"They exist cheek by jowl with pubs," says Mark Hastings. "You cannot address the nation's alcohol problem unless you look at both sides of the argument. Forty per cent of the nation's alcohol consumption is from the off-trade. It is just as much involved in this problem as the on-trade is."

The Publican says:​

Whose fault is it that lager is priced so cheaply in supermarkets and off-licences? Many brewers claim they have no control over pricing. Supermarkets claim they are simply giving the consumer value for money.

Huge cut-price deals are a classic sign in retail terms that capacity is outweighing demand. In other words brewers are producing more than they can sell, so they need to shift volumes at whatever price they can. Supermarkets say that brewers are quite happy to get the volumes out there. In other words it's everybody's fault.

Surely brewers want to get some value back into their brands - at the moment their lagers are just another commodity on the shelves.

Whatever the arguments are heavy discounting in the off-trade at least needs to be highlighted in the same way it is in the on-trade. Sadly the national media just does not seem to buy into this. It would far rather write or make programmes about youngsters licking the pavement after a night out exploiting irresponsible on-trade promotions.

There are those in the on-trade that are guilty of acting irresponsibly. Of that there is no doubt. But it would be nice to see the national media taking a consistent line when it comes to the off-trade. Because for all the arguments about why the price of lager in supermarkets is so low, charging £7.99 for 24 cans, as seems likely to happen, is quite simply ridiculous. It is irresponsible and if something similar happened in the on-trade we would never hear the end of it.