Making Financial Headlines · Page 3
Local Pub Faces a Rival With Excellent Access to the Fridge
· New York time
Lincolnshire has lost 27% of its pubs and bars since 2009, according to the BBC, while a departing landlord has blamed television and cheap alcohol. The figures and the landlord's explanation put a familiar business problem behind the bar: competing with a rival that lets customers wear slippers and control the remote. A pub sells more than liquid in a glass. It offers shared space, atmosphere and the possibility of encountering someone whose conversation was not selected by an algorithm. Those services cost money to provide, even when the customer's easiest comparison is the price of a drink. The landlord's account captures one view of the pressure on venues. The county's long decline also stretches across many individual business decisions, so the closure percentage cannot by itself assign a cause to every shuttered door. A statistical trend has no opinion about the quality of the quiz night. The commercial challenge is persuading customers that the trip offers enough value to repeat. The sofa's advantages are formidable: familiar upholstery, no journey home and a dress code developed around elastic. Its hospitality model has one weakness, however. Every guest eventually discovers that they are also the bar staff, the cleaner and the person responsible for finding the remote.
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