Man Friday stays at home

One undoubted casualty of licensing reform has been the high-street bar and nightclub market. Longer hours for the rest of the market has led to reduced sales for nearly everyone except those operators whose offer is value-based.

But there seems to be another problem on the high street - the decline of Friday nights. When I called around to speak to pub operators this week there seemed to a broad consensus on this.

Traditionally, Friday nights tended to produce sales levels roughly two-thirds of Saturday night's figures. One operator said he had noticed like-for-like declines on Friday nights stretching back at least four years at sites in well over 100 different towns and cities. Maybe the trend can be linked to increasing boredom, or wariness even, of the circuit, which saw it peak at the turn of the century. The trend seems to have accelerated in the wake of licensing reform. Another operator, whose sales are down 10% in like-for-like terms, claims 90% of the drop is linked to weaker Friday nights. A third operator has noticed that spend has become more focused on Saturday nights at the expense of Friday. So what's happening and why?

A variety of reasons where offered on my ring-around. There is talk of the decline in Friday night as the traditional big night out for blokes. One operator talked about the rise of event television on a Friday night - the The Big Brother eviction night occupies three months of Friday nights. The big final, said one operator, meant deserted pubs across his estate as his younger customers stayed at home. I suppose going out on a Friday night is a matter of habit - and habits change all the time, especially if another more compelling alternative comes along. Another operator is convinced his customers are substantially harder up this year than last year. His customers, he points out, have been receiving the same scary utilities bill increases that his pubs have.

Personally, I think the narrowness of the circuit's offer may be the key structural problem here. These high-energy pubs and bars set out to attract a high-spending youth audience. The problem is that this part of the market has excluded the rest of its potential audience, many of whom can now drink later in their suburban local. The circuit's natural constituency, the 18 to 24-year-olds, have an increasing array of exciting alternative things to do - you can understand why one of the two traditional big weekend nights on the somewhat-faded circuit might be sacrificable.