Enterprise defends tenants’ treatment

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Forums/News-Article-Comments/Enterprise-defends-tenants-treatment

IO thanks for enlightening me and apologies if I've completely forgotten that you've stated you are a retired BDM.

What I take issue with is your apparently rational suggestion that apparently rational things take place in the relationship between a pubco and their tenants.

This bears no relation to the reality which is that pubco employees connive, cheat, lie, misrepresent their business at all times, with a smile on their face and a learned, enthusiastic, supportive and enquiring timbre in their voice... with oblique and inapplicable suggestions for operational tweaks chucked in for good measure. That's during the good times (the time, between two to eighteen months after taking on a lease, before the tenant susses that they are on a slippery slope with financial ruin at the bottom). When there is a sniff that a tenant is in financial hardship this insincere stance gives over to obfuscation, threatening and bullying behaviour as a matter of course. 'To protect the Company's assets'.

Perhaps this was not the case in your day. I can't imagine when your day was though. It must have been a LONG time ago; My day in this archaic joke of an industry began in 1995 and signs of the above were evident from the start and began in earnest within three months of my taking on a new lease on a dead pub and turning it into a bustling, busy contemporary bar. It's not my imagination IO, I've been networking with tied lessees whose experience is the same for well over a decade and I have heard ex BDM's describe this culture, saying it made them have insomnia and turned their stomach so much they got out as soon as they could.

There.

J Mark Dodds Mind you back in 2008 after the government published estimates of the size of the Black Economy I pointed out that the REAL black economy - if they took account of what happens in the tied pub sector alone - is at least, conservatively, three times bigger than the official worst guesses. It may sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet but in the 2008 Select Committee hearings Ted Tuppen, completely out of the blue, picked up on the thrust of what I'd posted around the internet and on MA and the Publican forums and without prompting from anyone on the Committee or by any remotely related questioning, began telling the committee he had evidence that Lessees were underdeclaring income by hiding out of tie beer transactions and purchases they should be putting through Enterprises books - he was justifying the use of Brulines equipment. This surprising procedural interjection went down like a lead balloon with the MPs. A shiver of joy coursed through me as I guessed he'd read one of my rants about Enterprise making publicans into criminals!
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