Anyone prefer the days of the 'Big Six' breweries?

Raf Azzara posted in CAMRA unofficial on Facebook

Depends on how two dimensional a view you have. 

There is more variety of product across the bar over most of the country now but back then there was hope for market reform - and back then there was the raw material for exciting reform in the tens of thousands more pubs that existed then than do now.

Now the market is still foreclosed to the majority of new brewers, the retail price of beer has been manipulated upwards by a £1 a pint by private equity meddling in the beer tie and pubs are going out of business faster and faster to be replaced by anodyne mono food and drink dispense outlets indistinguishable from each other, mostly owned by ... one of the big six. 

And it's only going to get worse: The long term plans of all the major players are to asset strip their remaining estates to pay interest on the debts they raised to buy 'OUR' pubs in the first place and where they intend to 'grow and innovate' to invest in managed clone bar new builds as above.

Quite manifestly Mark Shirley has a better grasp of what's happened than you do Cornell and isn't into hagiography for the people who've brought the pub sector to its knees and destroyed the timeline of British Tradition and Cultural History while making themselves multi millionaires at the same time as bankrupting thousands of publicans and selling their pubs off to be Tesco's and betting shops.
It is NOT nonsense at all - changing the offer irreversibly? WHAT? Wake up. What are the BIG SIX doing now - to ALL their pubs? They're all the same blanded branded boring pastiches of what all pubs once were. These pubs all sell coffee, or have you two not noticed? 

Good pubs are places of social interaction. They need to be relevant to what is happening in society. They have been prevented from evolving by Private Equity. 

It's YOU who are promoting nonsense. It is wrong, patronising, and proves ignorance of what really makes pubs tick and what has really been happening in the pub sector for the last quarter century... Whitbread dumped pubs along with brewing because they wanted to get into cleaner more easy to determine income streams and they flogged them off to invest in hotels and other stuff that didn't involve having to horse trade with tenants who had sitting contracts and draymen.

The best pubs, pubs that continue always to be successful, always serve PEOPLE what people want. They might be beer only boozers, they may be moving toward being restaurants but whatever they are they always remain RELEVANT to their customers. They do not let their premises turn into filthy sticky carpeted shit holes and their bogs into swamps. They offer products that people want. Tied pubs are restricted from keeping up to date because their freeholders get in the way through intransigence and aggressive profiteering wherever they can.

How much time have you spent behind bars serving people like you rather than in front of bars pontificating about what's wrong with them and telling the people behind them how to run their business?