December 22, 2005

Partial ban on blankets

It looks more and more like smoking in pubs (or at least some pubs) is going to be banned. Personally I'm in favour of a partial ban — dry-led pubs serving plated, sit-down meals would become non-smoking, and wet-led pubs, which are often "community" pubs, would continue to allow people to smoke1. This means non-smokers taking on bar jobs will be able to find pubs to work in without exposure to environmental smoke, pub food will taste better, and those pubs which would die under a smoking ban get a reprieve. Most of the sort of people who don't like smoking in pubs probably already mostly go to dry-lead pubs anyway. Everybody wins, or at least nobody loses all that badly, I think.

However, recent research from some economists at UCL, reported in the Observer, adds an interesting twist.

Children's health will be put at risk from passive smoking if the government bans smoking in all restaurants and bars, according to dramatic new research out today.

The study, which will provoke fresh controversy over whether a partial ban would be the better option, concluded that parents, particularly poorer ones, who are prevented from smoking in bars tend to smoke more in front of their children at home. Passive smoking has been linked to breathing difficulties and asthma among children.

Source: The Observer, 18/12/2005

Now, I think that these stereotypical poor parents prone to smoking in pubs tend to go to "community" type pubs most of all. Which in my experience tend to be wet-led. So would it be fair to say that, for the sake of the children, a partial ban is actually a better bet than a total, blanket ban on smoking in pubs? Then again, this all flies in the face of research showing that a ban on smoking in enclosed public places is likely to reduce the amount of smoking at home. It's all so confusing.

I guess that if the balance of research shows that public health is best served by a total ban, then I can live with it; I do worry that it marks the beginning of the end for community pubs, though. But then I work in one, I would worry about that kind of thing, wouldn't I?

1 Dry sales in pubs are food sales, generally excluding things like crisps and nuts. Wet sales are everything sold over the bar, roughly. Hence a wet-led pub is one where the focus is on drink, whereas a dry-led pub makes most of its money through meals.

[Update 1: I mean led, not lead, apparently.]
[Update 2: Looks like a blanket ban is now more likely ]

Posted by James at 03:07 | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Tags for this entry:

July 18, 2005

Well under a quid

Nobody likes to feel ripped off. And a lot of people do, when they drink soft drinks in pubs. But, is this fair? Everyone seems to assume that because there's no tax on soft drinks, they should cost significantly less than beer.

Now, first of all, let me make a suggestion — if you're thirsty and can't bear to part with £2 for a pint of coke in a pub, I suggest drinking cordial with soda water. Most pubs will charge well under a quid for a pint of blackcurrant and soda; if you're feeling flush, consider asking them to put a small dash of lemonade in it as well, it tastes lovely.

That settled, what does a pint of coke in a pub actually cost? Well, to you, around about £2. To the pub, the syrup to make that pint of coke has probably cost £35 for a bag-in-a-box of syrup, which gets diluted 5.4:1 - apparently that's 141 16oz servings of coke in an ideal world, which I'm going to call 105 pints1, after you allow for what ends up in the drip trays behind the bar and so on. So, the syrup mix in your pint alone costs 33p. Then, there's the cost of having someone come out to maintain the dispenser, to fill up the gas cylinders, and the (marginal, admittedly) cost of the water. It wouldn't surprise me if this lot took the price to 50p on a pint of coke. Now consider that, of your £2, 30p is lost straight away as VAT.

So, £1.70 goes to the pub, who lose 50p of that straight away on supplying the drink. The rest has to pay for the glass you have the coke in (and replacing the glass when it breaks), the ice (and maintenance of the ice machine) you have in it, the slice of lemon, the bendy plastic straw, the staff to serve you the drink, to collect your glass, to wash the glass before it gets reused, to slice the lemons, to collect the ice from the cellar, to supervise the people doing all of the above, to organise their wages and make sure their tax is correct... and then, at the end of it all, it would be nice if the pub could make a profit, don't you think? It might encourage people to continue to run pubs.

Compare this to a pint of, say, Grolsch, in my local. As I understand it, he effectively pays about £1.14 a pint for his barrels of Grolsch, which then retails at £2.35 a pint. 35p of this is presumably VAT, so his "margin" is 86p, compared to £1.20 on the coke example. So, sure, the margins on coke are bigger, but not as significantly as some people would have you believe.

If anyone has any better figures on this stuff, I'd be interested to see them. I only started looking into this to see who was right out of the people who told me "coke in pubs is a rip off, it costs them something like 2p/litre", and the landlord who told me that he actually saves money by just having 2 litre bottles from Tesco behind the bar, instead of a postmix machine (so, he's paying about 50p a litre upwards, depending what offers are on). Turns out the truth is somewhere in between.

1 This is assuming 20oz == 1 pint; I'm not too hot on this Imperial stuff, so if somoene knows better please shout!

Posted by James at 03:35 | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Tags for this entry: