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You're the Landlord #1

With apologies to Paul Trevillion and based on incidents witnessed in the course of our pub-going.

A large group of students has been drinking in your pub for a couple of hours. One of them has just enough money to buy a pint which he takes off to the back room. Moments later, he returns with an empty glass and says he spilled it. He asks nicely if there’s any chance of a replacement on the house. One of your regulars chips in sarcastically: “I accidentally drank mine. Can I have a free one too?”

What would you do?

11 replies on “You're the Landlord #1”

Ask them where the spillage was so I can clean it up as it’s a health and safety risk, then upon finding out it had been spilled down their throat/that of their mate point out that I’m still more than happy to reach down their throats & clean up the spill before politely pointing out that I wasn’t born yesterday and suggesting that they take their space-filling, student arses out of my pub and to come back when they’ve got a more creative way of blagging beer/got a larger overdraft!

What Tyson said. And is this a real incident or just the usual student bashing. Does anyone really do this stuff?

My experience of student life (which couldn’t end quick enough in 2005) is that today’s crop, far from being sex-drugs-Marxism-fuelled, are boring, career-focused bore-wits who wouldn’t dare pull such a scam.

Would that the blagging student and sit-ins returned. Oh for the spirit of ’68!

(Sorry, my uni days were dull as hell…)

Clarifications: yes, this is a real incident. We’re not student-bashing (although suspected that the responses might prompt some!). The student in question was counting coppers onto the bar to pay for his drink.

So, what would you do?

Well, like Melissa said, if there is a genuine spillage and they’d been drinking there for a long while – and, perhaps this is the clincher, they were regular customers – I’d probably refill. No spillage, then bugger off!

I was at a pub with a mate of mine and his two year old boy on a Saturday afternoon. The kid was good as gold but managed to contrive a death-defying tumble from the bench with a hand catching a glass and – boosh – beer gone. We asked the staff for some towels to clear up the spillage and apologised profusely – a refill pint was offered.

While I think *asking* for a refill is a bit much, I’d like to think most good publicans can take events like this and see the human side of it.

Doubt there’s likely to be a run of ‘spilled-my-pint-get-me-a-refill’ incidents given a) the need for genuine spillage; b) the fact that you’d be very suspicious if the incident took place any time other than just after the customer had purchased their drink.

If they’d all been there a while and been okay, then yeah, I think it makes sense to offer a replacement purely for goodwill. Nothing’s worse for business than negative word of mouth!

(And as a few of you have said, they always have money for beer, so why would you want to alienate them…)

Richard, JJ and Melissa — thanks for having a go. We’ll probably put the answer (i.e. what we actually saw happen) tomorrow.

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