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Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Beer Blogger Bollocks of Britain Pontificate about Pubs




“They have produced … objectively verified, undeniably strong, irrefutable evidence proving that pubco’s routinely, endemically abuse the tie to consistently take a far bigger slice of profit than the publicans do”
That’s classic question-begging on at least two levels – one, you’re taking it as read that pubcos shouldn’t make more profit out of a pub than tenants do (Why? Where is it written that such a thing is immoral/unlawful/wrong? What’s you’re argument for saying this is wrong?) and two, you’re assuming without question that pubcos making more profit out of pubs than tenants is “abuse of the tie” – again, what’s your argument for declaring this to be abuse? And don’t say that pubcos should only take a “fair” slice of the pie – economics, and business, doesn’t work on what is “fair”, they work on what the parties involved in a transaction will accept, which ultimately comes down to supply and demand. Right now there is a constant supply of people wanting to be pubco tenants – Enterprise gets 70 applications a week. Enterprise, and every other pubco, will pitch the amount it takes from a pub at the level which ensures it continues to get a steady supply of new applicants to run its pubs. To demand otherwise shows a regrettable lack of understanding of how business works.

Martyn, if you regard this as abuse, so be it. It's not meant to be. It's objectively clear, based on everything you post up there about Tuppen's Army, that you very obviously don't know what you'e talking about, either that or you are a liar, because if you did know how that company, and the other pubco's who exhibit exactly the same behaviour, treat their tenants, you wouldn't be defending what simply is the utterly indefensible in that haughty way of yours.

That company, Enterprise Inns, is staffed by bullies, liars and cheats. They behave abominably toward their tenants, pure and simple. Their job is to extract everything from the licensee, leave them with so little they cannot stand against the pubco, and if they fail, another 'lamb to the slaughter' (reputedly Tuppen's own words) is ready, as you so helpfully point out above, at the rate of 70 inquiries a week, to be taken in and fleeced then hung out to dry; usually with a hefty Dilapidations' bill floating after them to the Official Receiver.

Eventually, when the pub's been flogged to death through successive tenants having not invested comprehensively in the fabric of the premises, and it's so run down that no one in their right mind would invest a penny in it; (and if they did have enough to sort out that kind of wreck they'd go and buy a freehold anyway), then the pubco simply puts the pub on the market suitable for alternative use and flogs it off, using the proceeds to chuck into their bottomless chasm of interest on their debts which they can't keep up with from revenue alone.  There are occasional exceptions to this rule - the main one being that if the pubco get a cash offer from a property developer for a particular pub that's doing well enough for the lessee to not be absolutely on their uppers and the pubco can't see a way to flogging them in the short term, then the pubco will flog off the freehold with a tenant in place and leave the new freeholder to do the bullying, abuse and piss taking until the tenant is hounded out or has to quit at lease termination when the new boss applies to take the pub back. And sometimes the pubco will have a pub they just know will have a few more years of fleecing in it in which case they do a 'Landlord's Improvements' scheme, spend the least amount possible to make the place lettable, then open it up, like a Venus fly trap, to all comers, advertising it with words like 'Well established community local' 'Great potential for increased food offer' and other meaningless mind numbing nonsense to attract a new entrepreneurial partner into a 'partnership' pact with the devil. You'll note that Heineken are now making a feature of doing up pub accommodation so the incoming lessees can 'get on with the job of running the business' without living in a sub standard run down hovel any private domestic Landlord would be banged up for allowing people to rent.

There is ample evidence of abuse toward tenants in submissions to inquiry after inquiry. Maybe you can do some work for a change and look it up? I certainly can't be bothered to do it for you.  I was abused as a tenant of Scottish & Newcastle Pub Company, my seeing a pattern of abusive behaviour repeated by successive pubco employees, at every level of the business from BDM to Jeremy Blood ignoring my communications about his staff abusing their jobs. There was no process, no grievance procedure, when they broke their promises there was never any come back, the tenant took it all.  My understanding of what was happening to me led me to networking with other lessees, from all pub companies, and discovering that I was not alone in this experience, we all were being told the same lies, mistruths, misrepresentations and distortions, being made the same promises and never having them delivered, given incentive targets to find that nothing happened at the end.  And that led to the Fair Pint Campaign being established. Not complicated, just a bunch of hard working, bright lively publicans running very busy pubs realising they were being totally shafted, got together and began making the right kind of intelligible noises about what was happening to them; across ALL pubco's - to government and every one else who would listen. And believe me at the start very few people were listening Martyn, they were mostly all like you - misinformed, ignorant and abused by the pubco's having hoodwinked them, as they have hoodwinked everyone, about their 'business model' which is very simply put, a massive white collar scam.

Taking the abuse issue further, as a semantic point, the evidence of widespread abuse is everywhere, all over the UK; in the thousands of asset stripped pubs that litter the countryside and our urban landscape.

Many, many of these pubs could easily still be trading had the pubco's, ably assisted by one clumsy, ignorant administration after another, not abused their publicans, the property they borrowed £billions to buy so subsequently we could include their bondholders, shareholders, the general public and communities all over Britain as being victim of pubco abuse along with suppliers, brewers whose margins have been stripped to the bone to get onto pubco price lists, and pretty much everyone else one way or another who's been taken in hook line and sinker by the pubco's ingracious hegemony of the pub sector - the hegemony that Tuppen refined and made an attractive art to the bullies that staff pubco's up and down the land.

Wake up Martyn, smell the coffee - being served in a thousand Starbucks, McD's, Costa's and Caffe Nero's instead of in the pubs of Great Britain because the pubco's running off with most of the cash prevented innovation and evolution in the pub sector - the place where Social Networks began, where Cafe Culture always resided in the British Isles which could not move with the times and the customers because there wasn't enough profit left in the pubs for their publicans to invest back into making the improvements that were needed to bring them into the 20th and 21st centuries.

Our pub sector languishes in a torpid doldrums of the pubco's making - dominated, in the blue corner, by the Tied Lease Estates, generally run down boozers that are the legacy of the #GreatBritishPubcoScam, the ones not making anywhere near enough profit for themselves but enough for the pubco's so that they have not yet fallen off the pubco cliff, and in the red corner the Managed Estates, dominated by bland barns, erzatz pubs that no one really likes, where it's four quid + a pint on one end of the sale and £1.99 at the other - as they compete for market segments with their blonde oak interiors and centrally devised 'British Fayre'.

The pubco's are guilty of many things that are criminal the most shocking is what they've done to our culture, right under out noses, so comprehensively with sleight of hand they've taken in almost everyone except the publicans they've shafted - taking them in in another way completely.

3 comments:

  1. Tremendous polemical rant, Mark, I congratulate you for it. But once again you're telling me I have to find the evidence to back your assertions, without actually supplying them yourself. If there is hard, actual evidence that "Enterprise Inns, is staffed by bullies, liars and cheats", let's be seeing it: stop telling me I "don't know what I'm talking about" without actually supplying the evidence to back that up. I’ll be very happy to believe that Ted Tuppen is the spawn of the Devil, but only when you do something more than just claim it with no documents to prove it. I'm not trying to be antagonistic: I'm just fed up with people telling me I'm wrong without offering anything to back that up than bald assertion and hearsay claims about what has allegedly happened to other people.

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  2. Martyn YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING or WRITING ABOUT and I really cannot be bothered to help you any more. It seemed for a moment you were offering to meet someone to have a chat about it? Nothing happened. You're not interested, you're a denier, a make believer, a fantasist. You seem to think the world of capitalism is some pure economic market corrected snow white driven thing that arrives at the right answers for consumers through an immutable balance of supply and demand that's ordained by what? The atoms of the universe as dispersed by the gods of the pubco's. RUBBISH. The tied pub sector is an unregulated morass of medieval malpractice that's decimated Britain's traditions and heritage already. Naysayers like you fuel it and keep the status quo smouldering when the pubco's should have been extinguished long ago. I'd bet You probably think the beer tie is a good thing. A lovely old British tradition. Well it's not, it's a tool for abusing people's human rights.

    The pub industry was fat slack and lazy before the slick securitisation and debt merchants came along to modernise it after the beer orders opened the door into the sleepy pubs playground. All these people did, these wine drinking white collar bankers, accountants and money market casino chancers, was chuck vast amounts of other people's money into buying buildings at stupid prices, creating a spiral of pub inflation, that had anachronistic legally binding supply ties attached that potentially offering an eternal, limitless, guaranteed income stream that stretched far into the future which they saw they could manipulate to screw every last drop of profit out of the estates to pay down the debt, skim a load off the top for themselves before scooting off into the Med with a few tens of £ millions in their underpants to go and buy islands and yachts with, leaving everyone else to mop up the mess down the time line of pub history. That is the Great British Pubco Scam and people like you - and there's plenty of you, lazy sofa lounging beer bloggers who call themselves 'EXPERTS' who've shored up the lie for the last two decades.

    You pontificate from your positions of pomp at the high table of the pub industry - and no doubt get invited to plenty of shindigs and promos while the people who earn ALL the money that pays for ALL of those shindigs are behind the jump working their bollocks off to pay the rent, the debts they raised to improve their own pub business and to pay the pubco's double open market prices for supplies AND the interest payments on their pubco;s debts and the £500K a year salaries of the execs who are turning the pub sector into a wasteland in the name of progress, cartels and crony capitalism. The real hands on publicans are the last people whom people like you can be bothered to talk to openly and honestly about what is happening to them. You prefer to tell them what's happening from your filtered vision and when they say, rather inconveniently for your world perspective: 'It's not like that'  You don't say 'Really? I'm interested, please tell me more',  You say 'prove it'. Slack. 

    It's simple Martyn, you never listen to the monkey, you just listen to the organ grinder talking down his oppression of the monkey: 'He loves dancing to my tune, I made him what he is'.

    You describe yourselves as 'experts' yet know only the most frothy top of the issues regarding the pub sector. You see pubs closing ALL over the country and say 'it's the market' and, seriously, you haven't got a bloody clue what you are talking about. You don't even know what the market IS. You've been hoodwinked hook line and sinker. If you really cared you'd do some research. It's all in the public domain but you completely ignore the facts of the situation preferring to sit back and congratulate yourself on how superior you are. It's pathetic.

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  3. No. I'm not going to waste any more time engaging with people like you who can't be bothered too open their eyes and look around. Go get a real job, go collect some glasses in a busy tied pub and ask the owners what they think of their margins and what they think of Ted Tuppen.

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