It's somewhat frightening, but not at all surprising, to see that over ninety percent of people who use this website think that when the Chancellor announces his delayed budget next week, the price of beer will go up. (At the time of writing, it's actually 91.9%.)
At a time when the price of just about everything is coming down in an attempt to kick start the economy, the staple mainstay of the pub industry - alcohol - is likely to get hammered. Even if Alistair Darling keeps his mouth shut on the topic of alcohol duty, the Alcohol Escalator put in place during last year's budget will ensure an increase in prices.
Pub landlords are doing their best to keep prices as low as they can; many of us don't put our prices up by anywhere near as much as we should in order to try and help the customers, often to the detriment of our own incomes, but last week I had a go at a bit of an experiment.
It seems that not as many pubs took part in Cask Ale Week as perhaps should have, but we did throw a bit of weight behind promoting this great British drink. The brewery supplied t-shirts for the staff, table talkers, beer mats, banners and so forth ... and I priced all ales at just £2.00 a pint.
The idea was simple: during this time of financial difficulty, put on a great offer, get people to try a different drink, and take away the difference between 'standard' bitter and 'premium' bitter. The maths behind it were a little shadier: make no money on the beer, but perhaps the extra custom will buy meals to accompany said beer, and so on.
It didn't work.
The IPA drinkers still drank IPA. The lager drinkers still drank lager. And although the Abbot drinkers thought £2.00 a pint instead of £3 was great, they didn't drink any more than they would have done anyway. When I looked at the volume of bitter sold over the Cask Ale Week, and compared it to sales of previous years, there was no discernible difference. Despite the adverts, the A-boards, the vinyl banners, nobody extra walked in to the pub to take me up on the £2.00 a pint offer than would have paid the normal price anyway. It seemed to me that perhaps people just weren't interested in beer.
Then, as I discussed the lack of my promotion's success with some people over the bar, a customer said something that utterly shocked me: "actually, you're now too cheap."
In a world where retailers are practically offering you the chance to sleep with their wives in order to get you to buy something, nothing is 'too cheap' any more. The thirty-seven inch LCD hi-def TV I bought for the bar last year is now half its original price. Digital cameras with pixel resolutions so high you can focus on worry-induced haemorrhoids in all their bumpy glory can be purchased for less than fifty quid. I swear that, if I tried hard enough, Citröen would actually sell me a brand new car for just 10p.
They'd probably even offer to pay the VAT for me, too.
When a Formula One team can be bought for just £1 and even Jenson Button has had to take a wage cut in order to guarantee his future, how can two pounds for a pint be considered "too cheap"?
Yet, as we discussed the theory further, the more weight it gained. The problem, it seems, is that my pub is a village local. Had I been a town pub, my offer might have been a huge success, but in the village everybody made the automatic, and incorrect, assumption that I had obviously raked in the money when beer was at its normal price. This, some felt, was clearly the only way that I was able to afford to sell the beer at such a low price. It makes working out what price is best for both sides very difficult indeed.
In this case, beer at £2 a pint was too cheap, and all I ended up doing was selling the same amount of beer at a much lower price.
The disappointing factor is that beer has had to return to its normal price. And next week, if Alistair Darling doesn't heed the call to halt the rise in alcohol duty, doesn't listen to the pleas from the industry to look at off-trade pricing rather than on-, it'll go up again. More small businesses will suffer, more people in this trade will lose their job, and more stories of woe and pub closures will inundate the press.
Not to mention that everybody will tell me that my beer is too expensive and that they can pick it up for just 50p a can in Tesco.