Yet, even if minimum pricing were introduced, would this have any advantage for the pub trade? Would it halt pub closures? The answer to both is ‘very unlikely’.
After all, drinking in pubs would remain more expensive. The answer to the question ‘would you prefer to pay the equivalent of £2 a pint for beer at the supermarket or up to £4 in a pub (£5 in some cities)’, is a no-brainer. People will still drink at home or outside the licensed trade. Pubs will still close.
So what is the solution?
Simple. Pubs should forget about competing on price alone — even though it is heartening to see many pubs passing on the penny price drop to their customers; and they should forget about fighting for the price gap between themselves and supermarkets to narrow.
These are mere diversions from the realities that pubs need to face up to and from the real differential they offer to the drinking public. As a group we need to attempt to put an end to the stay-at-home culture, with the Sky+ effect, other entertainments close at hand and supermarket-bought cheap booze. For me, we won’t do this by fighting a price war (or seeking to legislate for a minimum unit price).
Let us focus instead on delivering what customers want. There are many success stories of pubcos and freehouses that have adapted their offering and seen patronage rise. Ally good drink, good food and good entertainment to excellence in customer service and presentation, and we have a great basis on which to fight back.
Perhaps we ought to focus too on accepting that we still have too many pubs — or rather too many pubs serving too few customers with too few choices. It is all well and good for the ‘save our pub’ groups to campaign against local pub closures — especially against the perceived rise of the convenience store (the truth is the number of pubs converted has fallen over the past two years) — but one has to question where the protestors were when the pub was open.
In the majority of cases, pubs close for one reason only, and that is a lack of community interest.
There are two solutions: the first is to accept that we’ve too many pubs and allow them to be converted into uses of genuine community value; the second is to embrace the new values of the customer and to provide the services and environment they demand in order to draw them back to the pub.
Ultimately, it is the customer who decides which pubs thrive and which echo to the sound of patrons long departed.