[KennyBlanken]

> There isn't sufficient margin in drink to float a pub. The margin is in food (and to an extent, dispensed soft drinks).

In the US, the exact opposite is true. Alcohol sales are where the money is made (and yes, soft drink sales, but there's usually far less of that in an actual bar.) Food has nowhere near the profit margin. Multiple restaurant owners have told me this for years.

Why is it the opposite in the UK?

[smcl]

The food in many of these pubs is of very low quality and is designed to be quickly prepared (reheated) at scale with no complex steps involved. After a short time in the UK you can quickly tell what sort of food you can expect in a given pub, so I think most Brits know what they're getting. Personally, I think this (plus the fact that a large amount of the population take pride in enjoying shit food) give the UK a bad reputation re food.

And you'd actually be surprised how much soft drinks are served in pubs. They're very low wastage - so if your company budgets that X% will be lost for some reason, you'll very likely undershoot that and have only X/2% wasted. Additionally you can adjust the syrup/carbonated water mix so that your margins for each serving are higher. The dodgy pub I worked at as a student frequently used soft drinks as a way to balance stock in case of wastage (or in the case of a corrupt assistant manager, theft). Towards the end of a given stock-keeping period (monthly?) we'd often be told something like "Tennent's is down, ring it up in the tills as 3 small diet cokes" - meaning that there is less of a given beer in the stock room than expected when accounting for how much we ordered and how much we sold, and to correct for this we'd use take advantage of the surplus of coke stock (after a price adjustment) to try to counteract this. God help you if anyone asked for a receipt and accused you of swindling them ...

[SoftTalker]

Why on earth would you do this rather than expensing the missing beer and trying to figure out why it happened? I.e. who is walking out the back door with it?

[smcl]

See my other comment, there was for some reason an incentive to NOT account for this. It seems stupid now that I’m out in the real world, but when you’re making £5/hour:

- you don’t really feel empowered to challenge this sort of thing

- stock or till shortfalls of small amounts like £20 that are threatened to come out of your paycheque feel much more serious than they were, especially when you’re a student in an expensive city and that £20 feeds you for a week

- the reason it happened is often known, there’s just a reluctance to account for it correctly. We are taking about very small amounts here

[CydeWeys]

The people doing this are clearly getting one over on the owners. It's common for pub employees to swindle the owner.

[smcl]

We weren’t swindling anyone :-) The manager of the pub (or I guess the licensee?) was the one telling us to do this. And the reason they’d do this is because the pub was part of a group of pubs, and there were incentives for the managers to hit wastage targets. So if there was a shortfall in some beer (like some somehow wasn’t usable, or there was a fuckup when switching a keg that caused the first 5 pints or so to be pure foam, or on a busy night on a big round you’d incorrectly ring something up without noticing) they’d try to recover that this way.

There wasn’t much theft that I was aware of, other than one assistant manager (who was constantly accusing us of stealing) was caught red handed stealing stock, but that was whisky or rum which wasn’t part of this iirc (when entire bottle goes missing, that really sticks out - very stupid man)

[lmm]

Plenty of pubs competing with each other, and the pub culture is one of sitting and drinking slowly. A US bar is to a pub what McDonald's is to a restaurant - a very different business model that relies on pushing people through quickly.

[vinay427]

I’m not sure what US bars you’ve been to, but I definitely haven’t seen anywhere near that level of difference to a pub in the UK. There’s often more of a focus on food and meals in a pub than a typical bar that’s branded as a bar, but both seem to encourage longer visits, pubs slightly more so.

[ascorbic]

It's not. I'm not sure where OP got that idea from. The margin is in alcohol in the UK too, in pubs but also in restaurants.