A potent mix for the future?

The financial pages of the national press this weekend have contained interesting news for the pub fanatic. Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, two of the major pub companies, who have numerous pubs in North Devon, have seen their shares in freefall. Their landlords will tell you, usually in private, that this is no surprise at all; the tied house system obliges landlords to pay over the odds for their beer, making it even harder for them to compete, particularly in a recession.

In addition, if landlords had greater control over their buying and selling, I think our pubs would improve overnight; the bland corporatisation of our pubs is disheartening, at the least, anyway and perhaps the potent mix of a sinking economy and the struggling pubco sector could lead to a welcome resurgence of the free house. Imagine! Goodbye uniform decor, ale, music, prices, service. Hello character, fun, community, history, and...profits for our local pubs. But I remain pessimistic, at least in the short term.

Wetherspoon's has launched what seems to be a price-cutting war, with 99p pints, which few free houses could ever compete with. I have said before, JDW sells outstanding beer, but its pubs have zero attraction otherwise; they, and their ilk, seem to be pure function, zero poetry. That is not surprising, because they are often micro-managed, to all intents and purposes, by suits clutching armfuls of spreadsheets and PR garbage.

I only wish the dead hand of the suits had not rested so heavily on our beloved pub trade; the wizards in charge of these pub property dynasties rake in millions, while our landlords often earn less than the minimum wage. And we are left with pubs that are more like an outlet of McDonalds than the Rose and Crown. "Theme bars" have only one theme: frail crapness runs through them like letters in Blackpool rock (which has lots of theme bars).

There also seems little we pub-goers can do to pioneer a revolution in pub ownership, other than supporting our free houses by going to them and perhaps lobbying for a law to oblige pub companies to give landlords the option of buying their own beer direct from brewers. 

I wouldn't be surprised if the pub firms started trying to cut their losses; the long-promised decimation of the pub trade might be about to happen quicker than we thought.

What will happen then could herald a brilliant future for pub lovers and landlords.

In the meantime, we need to keep it local and support our pubs as best we can, particularly the good ones.