When is a Pub MORE THAN A PUB?

MORE THAN A PUB

Craft Union, one of the various pub 'brands' the egregious zombie pub company Stonegate Inns devised to game its reprehensible business practices around the Pubs Code 2016 regulations [which I helped bring into place with years of dedicated voluntary work] using the More Than A Pub trope for its own marketing.

Irony abounds in the pub sector

BTW. 

Just occurred to me: Many people in this group may not know, but this is common knowledge to those of us who work professionally in the pub sector, understand the true value of pubs to their communities, and have a decent overview of the different kind of activities various different kinds of pub companies get up to right across the country as the pubs crisis continues to accelerate unabated by anyone but plucky members of communities who fear losing THEIR Local Pub forever, who then get together with other local people to mobilise as everyone here in Community Pubs Network have done.

ALL pubs represented in this NETWORK, with rare exception, were run into the ground by one of the big tied pub sector pubcos. Stonegate [Enterprise Inns], Admiral Taverns, Marston's, Greene King, Punch Taverns, and Star Pubs & Bars [Scottish & Newcastle/Heineken] all of them fully paid up members of the British Beer and Pub Association.

These 'pub companies' are all private equity driven vehicles designed to extract the maximum amount of profit possible out of thousands of individual tied lease tenants. They do this simply by charging tenants profiteering rent and wholesale supply prices which in effect controls the nature of each publican's supposedly entrepreneurial pub business.

So: Tied tenants don't invest in the bricks and mortar of 'their' pubs, simply because they don't make enough profit because their pubco freeholder takes it all. So tied pubs have been chronically starved of investment for decades... THIS private equity greed is what created The Pubs Crisis. This private equity greed is what makes OUR pubs all over Britain unfit for purpose, and this is what stresses hundreds, and hundreds, of Local communities all over the country into fearing the permanent loss of THEIR LOCAL.

It's been going on for decades since the 1989 Beer Orders opened up the pub property market from being one kind of monopoly to transition to another, more aggressive form of financialised monopolistic practice, and the ONLY people doing anything about it are Locals who care about their pub for all the right reasons but who know next to nothing about owning and operating complex mixed retail public house businesses out of unfit for purpose run down broken commercial property that needs comprehensive retrofit and refurbishment to make it fit for 21st century purpose.

It's not a pub market we have in the UK, it's a RIGGED microcosm of disaster capitalism