The inhospitality industry

 


I don’t often blog but I wanted to tell the story of a pub crawl I didn’t go on. A niece of mine recently turned 18 and her weekend celebrations involved a pub crawl and house party. I can speak of the latter being a fun evening, but this is the short tale of the former.

A cheeky WhatsApp informed me my niece was starting her evening out in a Wetherspoons. The app is the greatest innovation of the age and after asking whether they all had ID she replied yes, they were 4 of them, I sent them a bottle of prosecco and enough glasses. My sister would have disapproved of shots or the lurid coloured cocktail jugs they may have preferred.

The following evening I noticed there were 4 times the number at the house party. Alcohol availiable and no divide between those that hit the magic 18 and those that hadn’t.


Why only 4 on the night out? A simple reason. Only 4 of them were 18. Not only in Wetherspoons, they were ID’d in every bar they went in. Further to this each were ID’d and if one didn’t have it, no one was getting served. They couldn’t order a soft drinks for the 17 year old. The pub could not guarantee they would not swap drinks and alcohol would be handed to the 17 year old. The pubs and bars were strict. All of them. Had they not all had ID, they weren’t getting that prosecco.

There is a sound business reason for this. The fines are large, the licence threatened and the authorities send gotchas out to try to entrap pubs. It’s more than their pubs worth to take a chance. If you want to trade, you trade within the regulations and law.


The result of this is for a year cohort turning 18, friendship groups split over the year, as the kids turn 18. The only place to party together, is the home of parents. Pubs are really not a thing anymore.


We can get into nostalgia and we would all have a familiar tale of underage drinking. Times were more liberal back in the day. Things are more puritanical now. I can regale you with a tale of going out with friends on a pub crawl, upon passing our O levels (the exams taken at age 16). or seeing an A level tutor in the pub at lunchtime and him telling us “I didn’t see you, you didn’t see me, got a fag?”


Why is this change to societal norms and laws relevant? I think it fall into anecdotal evidence that supports a pre existing opinion. My opinion is that when observing that young people drink far less and appear to have less use for the hospitality industry, there are many factors at play. That generation are certainly bombarded with health messaging that places drinking on a par with smoking.

But I think the argument misses something. The hospitality industry has become less hospitable to younger customers. It is not good enough to be 18, have a drivers licence, if your friend is still 17. You can’t have a vodka and coke and a coke for your friend. You can sod off is what you can do. You can come back in 6 months when you’re both 18 and then you will be treated with initial suspicion. If they don’t like your ID, they’re keeping it, and your Mum is coming back tomorrow to threaten them and be angry if you don’t find that drivers licence and return it immediately. A real risk this generation faces when handing over driver licences,


The hospitality industry has in many ways been its own worse enemy. Supporting minimum pricing in the belief they could benefit from an age of puritanism. They made one hell of a mistake when they meekly accepted the banishment of smokers to the grotty shelter by the bins. I think the bigger mistake was accepting and not standing up for themselves and allowing themselves to be bullied into inhospitality toward the cohort of new customers arriving. A generation whose 1st experience is considerably less welcoming to them as it was to you, those many moons ago when you bought a pint aged 15. Ultimately this is industry death.

I’ll return to this. Watching how her and her friends socialise when they are all 18. I think she’s off to university. There’s another niece hitting 18 in a few years. Will pubs and bars be as significant to their youthful social life as it was mine? I doubt it, but we will see.


Do comment with your age when you 1st went into pubs.


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