Flexibility around opening hours can be helpful for pubs – but what if they get addicted to being closed?
In the past few weeks we think we’ve noticed a vicious circle in effect: pubs aren’t open, so we don’t go out, so it’s not worth it for pubs to be open…
Christmas and New Year are weird times, of course, and Michael Deakin has made the case for giving bar staff some time off at this time of year.
This year has been particularly weird, too, with Christmas and New Year landing mid-week.
As Jess’s little brother, a bar manager for several years until very recently, tells us Wednesday is the worst day for Christmas to land because of the difficulty of planning deliveries.
Restricted opening hours are also arguably what gives micropubs a competitive advantage.
When we talk to Ray’s mum about her time running a pub in the early 1980s, she says being able to stay closed on Monday and Tuesday lunchtimes would have made a real difference.
But, still, lately, we’ve found Bristol pubs closed when we have expected to find them open, or closing surprisingly early.
For each pub, we suppose it made sense in context: the cost of lighting, heating, and staffing a pub must sting if nobody turns up to drink.
But collectively, unfortunately, the message they’re sending is: stay at home, don’t bother.
What we want to do when we go out is wander to a pub, see how it feels, and maybe settle, or maybe wander on.
We don’t want to plan, or commit, booking our space days or weeks in advance. That feels… not very pub.
It’s easier these days to check an individual pub’s seasonal opening hours. If they haven’t updated Google (they should be doing this) then it’s usually on Facebook or Instagram.
But having to do that bit of detective work for eight possible pubs before you even know if it’s worth leaving the house? Too much faff.
As consumers, we want to know: are the pubs, generally speaking, open, or are the pubs shut?
Beyond seasonal variation, we want individual pubs to pick their hours and stick to them.
A couple of years ago, we chatted to a publican who was frustrated at another publican they’d been mentoring:
“They keep changing their hours! It’s quiet Monday, so we’ve stopped opening Monday. It’s quiet Tuesday, so we’ve stopped opening Tuesday. We’re opening late on Sunday now. If people keep coming to your pub and finding it shut when they expect it to be open, they’ll stop coming altogether! That place? Oh, it’s never open…”
Our advice on blogging has long been “Write as if you have an audience and eventually you might get one.”
The same might go for pubs, opening hours, and customers. Consistency and predictability counts for a lot.
In a city like Bristol, where your regulars disappear around the country and students evaporate during holiday periods, it might feel pointless – but it’s also an opportunity to connect with potential new customers:
“We live round the corner but hardly ever come in! We really should do this more often in 2025…”
At the time of writing, there’s gloomy news about the performance of “the high street” in December 2024.
This made us think about the delicacy of this whole ecosystem.
People go into town to spend their pocket money, have a few drinks, maybe meet friends.
If the shops aren‘’’t there, because they’ve gone online or moved out of town, pubs suffer.
And if the pubs aren’t open, shops suffer, because town loses a large part of what brings it to life.
Nothing is simple. Everything is connected. How do we make this a team effort?
6 replies on “Open and they might come, close and they definitely won’t”
A very good point – it’s not only the individual pub that suffers from erratic hours, it’s the trade as a whole, and the wider High Street ecosystem.
And, if you are going to open short hours, at least make sure they’re clearly displayed both outside the pub and on social media, and stick to them!
It hardly needs to be said that one of the factors behind Wetherspoon’s success is that customers can be confident they will actually be open!
Unpredictable opening hours are one of the most certain signs that a pub (or pub under that current management) is entering a death spiral, knowingly or not. Licensees often justify the practice by pointing to the cost of overheads but, like with a shop, these are exactly that — fixed costs of running a business for the benefit of its customers not the staff or management. Anyone visiting at a time with the expectation that the pub will be open and then finding it closed will most likely never return and tell their friends not to bother either. So for the sake of saving a few quid on electricity, several hundred pounds in future turnover will be foregone.
There are also pubs that seem to be run for the benefit of a closed group of locals, whose routine the erratic opening hours are designed around or on whose departure from a session triggers the closing of the pub. I know of one or two that survive like this because the pub is more of a retirement project or is a micropub with much lower overheads. However, even these are precarious businesses, dependent on a small customer base and should try to attract more widespread custom. The easiest way of doing this is to be open when someone enters on impulse or has researched the place from somewhere like the Good Beer Guide (in which some CAMRA branches fill the majority of their allocation with micropubs).
Maybe the point about erratic opening hours is best made by the example of the pub chain with the most predictable hours of all. Wetherspoons business model is based on sweating its property assets for as many hours of the day as possible from early morning to late night – and to appeal to different market segments during the day. Most pubs are businesses with relatively high fixed costs (rent/mortgage, rates, utilities, fixtures and fittings, staff to some extent, etc.) and those costs have disproportionately increased in recent years. It’s the beginning of a slippery slope to try to cover those costs over a shorter number of opening hours, particularly if they’re so erratic they deter new customers. It also becomes self-reinforcing and affects other pubs. If people find too many pubs shut on, say, Tuesday evenings then they’re less likely to go out at all and visit the pubs that stay open.
A particularly well timed and resonant post. Fancying a lunchtime pint yesterday, I headed into Bristol on the bus. On the journey I did think to check that my destination pub would be open. It wasn’t. So I got off the bus early to go to a pub that has no internet presence, but a reputation for being “always open”. Except that yesterday it wasn’t. Saved in the end by a post on a CAMRA WhatsApp group highlighting Brass Castle Bad Kitty vanilla porter on at another city centre pub. A happy ending: I managed to get there before it had all been drunk.
In the US the problem is closing times. Pubs will have their hours on the door as 11am to Close. What is close? It is whenever the staff feels like business is too slow. If you keep closing early your customers will say “we shouldn’t go there after 9, they are always closed”. Pretty soon the pub will be closing at 8:30, then 8, then close permanently.
This happened to us yesterday. Two of our regular haunts were closed so we found a new place we’d not visited before. It turned out to be really nice. The Titanic Plum Porter on keg certainly helped! We’ll be back there and the other two places will lose our little bit of custom.
100%. I visited two micropub/taprooms in Chichester today, specifically taking a few days holiday 50 miles from home to see the town and hopefully visit them. Google, Insta, all pointed to them being open. Neither were. I don’t mind if you need to be closed to stay afloat – just spend 1 minute updating Google…