Your 1 degree analogy is good Gilbert but generous. The pubco beancounters set out to make vast amounts of money for doing very little with a dormant, full of potential industry then realised, as time went on, they didn't have to do ANYTHING to make their returns on other people's capital, which is where they got really lazy and when they went right off course.

Few of the industry's problems are rocket science to sort out, there's just one massive problem slap bang in the middle - pubcos whose vision of financial world dominance revolve around a shortsighted and intellectually impoverished business model that was formulated and established by bean counters out of a rapacious greed for quick big returns over long term
Darby: we must raise tenants' calibre

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/news.ma/ViewArticle?R=84592

No doubt if one ambitious pubco had actually DONE from the outset what all pubcos they SAY they do, instead of blowing off a load of glossy smoke and mirrors designed to fool everyone that it's all a never ending fun fest, the industry would be in very different shape than it is now.

Misuse of the power of the tie has always been a problem. The British Pub landscape was already largely an industry with an impoverished, sluggish, fat and slack backward looking vision when the Beer Orders came into force. The industry was already starved of creative, intellectual and financial investment back then.

All that has happened in the intervening 20 years, in essence, is a massive comprehensive asset stripping exercise by a small number of people who couldn't give a fig for beer, people or community but have a keen eye for how to buy a yacht on the back of sitting in a boardroom working out how to reduce tenants' margins and increasing their own without anyone noticing.