Back in the day – Eminem’s, specifically – it was popular to wear significantly-outsized trousers accessorised with a large chain connected to your wallet. A nod to the pocket-watch-and-chain look? Most definitely not, and not to be suggested down any dark alleyways. In those days, people knew how to look after their wallets, and that was when wallets meant something. Losing your wallet had an impact, although losing an unlocked phone (or a locked phone and your face) can be a whole lot worse.

 

The past, of course, is a different place, and you can’t live there. But for those who like to make occasional visits, wallets aren’t the only difference; the amount they get emptied has shifted too. Before you start lecturing on inflation, consider the amenity creep we have enjoyed in what are now referred to as “experiences”.

 

Going to a gig, a sporting event or being locked in a room with your colleagues and forced to find your way out used to come with a warm beer and some crisps, maybe some chips if you got there early enough. The world in which Eminem is 51 years old offers a jamboree of eating and drinking options, and none of them with change from a fiver.

 

Take Lord’s, the home of cricket, and sandwiches in a Tupperware box. The venue has been upping its game in recent years, including a Veuve Clicquot bar where spectators can watch the game they’ve paid £100 to attend being played metres away, but on a handy screen while drinking champagne. It’s very popular. 

 

This year will see a further overhaul, with Freemans Event Partners launching a new food and drink retail concept in a whole new structure, with more choice and self-checkout. The group reckoned it had streamlined the process and would cut 36 seconds from the average transaction time. And in a seven-hour day at Lord’s, every 36 seconds counts.

 

Is the experience better? Yes. Not everyone has Tupperware, and Lord’s does still give you the option of bringing your own food and, unusually, alcohol. Is the experience more expensive? Yes. Making something fancier than it used to be – or “driving ancillary revenue through experience” as it’s known in hospitality – is mandatory for a sector under the cosh of high interest rates and paying people a decent amount of money. To the guest, the spend may be much higher, but to the venue, it may only be breaking even. 

 

The hotel sector has been shimmying along this wire for some time, with costs blowing up, and only so much it could charge per room. How can you charge more without it costing more? Enter the twin delights of personalisation and the experience. This can be distilled down to “if people can be made to feel special then they will spend more”.

 

This has been common across the luxury end of the market for longer than we’ve been packing trunks on camels, but now the average human is rubbing up against these luxury experiences on a day out. Delivering on this upscale experience with limited teams and a focus on cost has led to a bubbling up of technology, which is best handled with care. Witness the offering at Lord’s. Selling self-service as a luxury is a delicate balance; the payoff for the guest is speed and choice. 

 

In the hotel sector, properties have realised that technology is what the customer wants, and that done right, it improves the experience. One provider of messaging technology reported a 30% increase in engagement when guests could choose how they communicated with the hotel – using WhatsApp, for example – and the room service average order increased in value by 15%. Convenience married with a lack of staff judgement when you order extra cheese on your burger.

 

For hotels, the desired end result of delivering a better experience is not only revenue, but a lifetime of loyalty. Loyalty is big business in hotel land, because it encourages guests to book directly and not use the online travel agents. This means something when those online travel agencies (OTAs) can charge 30% for a booking. In the wider hospitality setting, it helps to think of the OTAs as a marketing cost and no one likes those. 

 

We hear a lot about the fight for share for the customer wallet, and that battle is being played out in the ghostly echoes of kebab vans. The latest Barclays Consumer Spend report found that the overall hospitality and leisure sector saw a 2.7% rise in spending in May, down on the 4.1% increase in April, as discretionary spend fell. Rich Robinson, head of hospitality and leisure, Barclays Corporate Banking, said: “It is hoped that spending will rebound in the coming months, with events such as the Euros, Wimbledon, and Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ on the horizon.”

 

The price for a portion of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon has remained the same since 2010, at £2.50. Will the All England Club bow to the pressure of personalisation this year and offer a choice of 100 different toppings for an extra tenner? Those self-closing roofs don’t pay for themselves. Maybe there’ll be an app.

Wandering around the smart Belgravia area of London on Father’s Day involved passing some of my favourite pubs including the Fox & Hounds, Nag’s Head and The Grenadier, which I have frequented over many years. One common theme among them is that they are all pretty small, and their cosiness is an attractive characteristic that continues to draw me in.

Small proportions might be an appealing aspect to me, and no doubt many other customers, but it is proving to be increasingly problematic one for pub operators. We are at a point when the pub industry has a very serious downer on small venues, and it’s a worrying scenario for their future existence.

In recent weeks, we have had a raft of leading pub operators highlight just how tough it is to profitably run a smaller venue with the rising costs faced today. Timothy Taylor managing director Tim Dewey highlighted the keenly felt issue recently: “If you run a full offer, you’ve got such high costs with kitchen staff, paying employees and rising utility bills that you need a high level of turnover, and some of these pubs just don’t have the space or sufficient local trade to be able to do that. It’s sad, and I worry for the future.”

The decision by Fuller’s to recently sell 37 smaller pubs to Admiral Taverns was part of its shift to focusing on larger outlets, which the company stated was a segment on which it is much happier to focus its investment. The decision of where to commit investment has been uppermost in the mind of Oakman Group founder Peter Borg-Neal, who has concluded that it is firmly on chunky-sized pubs.

Speaking at Propel’s Excellence in Pub & Bar Retailing Conference, he stated: “I like big pubs…I would want to build big, big pubs capable of doing £100,000 a week because I think they can manage these economic ups and downs far better. I think small pubs are quite hard at the moment.”

This very much resonates with the relatively long-standing thinking at JD Wetherspoon, which has an ongoing strategy of pruning its portfolio as it skews the mix to larger venues with hefty potential turnovers. In the previous six months, it has closed 13 smaller, weaker performing outlets and opened two new venues. It also seems to have accelerated its commitment to expanding the size of its existing outlets.

Founder Sir Tim Martin has stated that up to 50 outlets will be scaled up to boost their square footage over the next few years. Scanning through the new issue of the company’s glossy magazine, this activity is clearly well underway: The Prince of Wales in Cardiff has increased in size by 20%; The Six Chimneys in Wakefield had doubled in size; the Wetherspoon unit in London Victoria station has extended into the YO! next door; and The Red Lion in Skegness has expanded into the adjoining betting shop.

Interestingly, this go-big-or-go-home strategy is very much out of kilter with other consumer-facing sectors such as quick service restaurants (QSR) and retail, where there is much evidence of a growing appetite for smaller units. The likes of Pets at Home, B&Q, Screwfix and Majestic Wine are among those brands expanding their smaller store portfolio. It is a similar story with the QSR sector, where pretty much every operator is developing compact formats. Such a trend is also taking place in the US, where real estate firm JLL reported that in the first quarter this year, as many as 68.5% of leasing deals were for spaces of 2,500 square feet or smaller. The demand for 5,000-10,000 square-foot outlets has been decimated.

These moves highlight how the physical space in QSR and retail is very much regarded as part of a broader multi-channel eco-system. The units are increasingly about the collection of digital orders and returning of unwanted goods, so a pick-up/returns window is of greater value than a large store for browsing or a QSR dine-in area. 

Unfortunately, this scenario is all rather alien to the small pub, where delivery and multi-channel are not in the lexicon. This suggests they will likely face ongoing pressures during these straitened financial times. If ever there was a time to support the small pub, it must be now, and thankfully, they don’t need too many to fill them.

Still damp and wind-battered from ten days in the Outer Hebrides, my journey home last week was broken by an overnight stop in Inverness. We planned to finish the holiday with a bit of a pub crawl but ended up visiting only two, spending nearly the whole time in Black Isle Brewing’s taproom.

It seemed like everyone else in the city was doing the same. On a Monday night, most of the pubs and bars were either empty or closed, but Black Isle was busy and rocking with a great diversity of folk, drinking their way through a tempting beer list and tucking into tasty pizzas (the bases were made with semolina, giving them an unusual crunchy texture). Something special was going on here that caused me to reflect on and adjust my thinking on brewery taprooms.

A few years ago, following a talk I gave at Edinburgh Napier University on “the new drinking spaces”, I was invited to write a chapter on taprooms for an academic volume titled, drily, Researching Craft Beer. Under the heading “from connoisseur to community”, I argued that what had begun as brewery sampling rooms were evolving into community hubs, in some cases adopting the traditional role of the local pub.

Stroud Brewery’s taproom, on an industrial estate just outside the Gloucestershire town, is a prime example, with events spaces as well as a spacious bar and kitchen spread over three floors alongside the brewery. In contrast, the kind of taproom you find, say, on the Bermondsey Beer Mile opens only a couple of days a week and is chiefly designed to give beer enthusiasts a chance to explore the brewery’s range.

Black Isle, though, was different again. Of course, it didn’t strictly conform to my narrow definition of taprooms on the same site as the brewery. Its brewery is a few miles out, but it still had that feel about it, a sense of proximity to the brewing process that came through an assurance of quality and authenticity that comes with drinking at a place directly run by the people who make the beer.

What most struck me was the nature of the customers. They were all ages (although skewed towards the younger) and a variety of nationalities, equally male and female, everyone somehow gelling together. The long tables helped them to mix, inviting conviviality and conversation between different groups and fuelling that warm buzzing noise of a happy pub or bar.

And there was something else. I’ve noticed how certain sections of the community can feel more comfortable in a taproom than in a traditional pub. Families with young children, for instance. The pram in the bar is a common feature of taproom culture. There’s more space, perhaps, and a kind of unspoken permission for that sort of thing. Black Isle had that relaxed, liberal vibe, but it wasn’t families particularly that were drawn to it, and least not on that Monday night. It was the traveller, the tourist, which found it especially welcoming. 

Inverness, I should note, is a centre for exploring the Scottish Highlands (there’s another one across the mountains at Fort William), and the bar is attached to hostel-type accommodation. But a part of the reason for its success must be that taprooms are an international phenomenon, recognisable in cities all over the world, as are the modern styles of beer they serve – although Black Isle had a couple of cask options alongside the keg taps.

Its customers that night must have felt a familiarity there – they will have immediately understood it and felt welcome. The community in this case was not the local community, although there were some locals. Taprooms like this speak an international language of beer and a certain standard of service.

To generalise – and it’s reflected in their open-plan, uncluttered design – taprooms are more accessible, in the broadest sense, than traditional pubs. It’s hard for me to say it, but there’s a hump to climb when you walk into a pub. There are strange protocols, which of course lend pubs their charm, but taprooms are easier to navigate in every sense.

Veteran pub-goers don’t notice. It’s their first language. Yet it’s evident when something disturbs the norms. The horror felt by many (including me) at the perpendicular queues at bars that have sprung up as a hangover of covid regulations is one example. They weren’t queuing perpendicularly at the Black Isle bar. You don’t need to if everyone understands how things work, if bar staff catch the customer’s eye and everything’s cool. That’s something traditional pubs could perhaps learns from the modern international taproom.

The starting point in advancing change within the sector is understanding the terminology. Language has the power to guide people on a journey towards inclusion or the power to exclude. Let’s start at the basic level of why replacing the word “equality” with “equity” is essential. 

Equality works on the premise that we all start from the same position and need the same tools or resources to succeed. Equity acknowledges that marginalised groups are not starting from the same position due to lack of access and are likely to need resources or tools that consider historical context and barriers faced.

Diversity is a fact. The hospitality industry is extremely diverse, and inclusion is an act – and one requiring concerted effort. A focus on advancing inclusion and equity will bring about change. Three areas requiring focus include:

Education: Understanding equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) comes through education. Multiple agents of change operate within this area designed to upskill leaders – my business being one. Think of it like this: no leader would attempt to deliver a marketing strategy without the appropriate expertise and educating themselves on the matter, including what success looks like. The same applies here.

Accountability: Inclusion and equity won’t just happen. Anything that gets measured gets managed. What is your diversity make-up (by hierarchy)? Why do your employees leave? Why do they stay? Who is being promoted? Who is not? If you can gain the answers to these types of questions through the lens of race, gender, class and other characteristics, this will transform your understanding of your teams. Once you understand your teams, you can devise a plan for progress. Notably, there must be accountability within your leadership teams for this progress. Otherwise, nothing will change.

Strategy: It is broadly understood in business, across all industries, that strategy is essential for achieving any goal within the company. It requires careful planning and resources, and expertise and must be time-bound with continuous action. An equity, diversity and inclusion strategy requires the same approach.

In my role as EDI ambassador for Imbibe Live, all collaborations have been rooted in industry education and delivered through panel discussions and diverse supplier presence. Imbibe Live is taking place at The Grand Hall, Olympia, London on 1-2 July 2024, and I will be chairing two sessions on Tuesday, 2 July. 

The first, at 2.30pm, is titled “The Culture of Cocktails”. Three emerging drink brands rooted in culture and heritage will join me for a flavourful cocktail tasting. This will be followed by a panel discussion at 3.30pm titled “Advancing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Drinks Industry”. This will feature other agents of change from across the sector for an intersectional and thought-provoking discussion.

Be Inclusive Hospitality will have a stand showcasing some innovative drink brands over the two days. Come and say hi if you visit – we are at stand C119. There was no shortage of options for both emerging brands and agents of change to participate in Imbibe Live for 2024, which fills me with optimism about the future of this industry becoming more equitable, diverse and inclusive.