Some interesting points made in this article, definitely worth a read.

Article from the East Anglian Daily Times - Suffolk and Essex Edition

Some particularly interesting points worth highlighting:

It's not as simple as that. Pubs are complex businesses to run. Diversity adds more complexity. Simple and complex are opposites.

See http://hardknott.blogspot.com/2009/02/diversification.html

I don't think that anyone has suggested that running a pub is an easy business - no matter how it might look from the customers' side of the bar.

All businesses are more complex than they appear and change, whether it be diversification or consolidation, is difficult to manage. But change is essential; any business that is not responsive to change will, sooner or later, fail.

Does anyone think though that what they face now is something new or has it happened before?

Cheers, Rob.

Change has always happened -there's nothing new about that. But each change will usually be different from a previous change - that is why it's called change. Businesses, like organisms, must be responsive to change or they will become extinct.

Just cast your mind back to the 1960s (only a couple of generations ago) and look at all the changes, good and not so good, that have happened. Pubs, to cite the business to which this forum is primarily devoted, rarely served food, rarely served tea or coffee, were all closed in the afternoon, didn't admit children, were getting rid of cask beer as quickly as they could, had many customers who drove away intoxicated, unfearing of the breathaliser - and were full of tobacco smoke.

All the changes to pubs that have happened over that half a century have been seen as threats by some and opportunities by others. The opportunists who have worked with change have succeeded; many of the others have failed.

Sounds like heaven to me...

And don't forget that there was a damn sight more real ale sold in those days than there is today.

As I said, some thing were good and some not so good. Remember, back then all pubs were closed from 1400 to 1700 on a Sunday - no popping in for a drink whilst you were on a Sunday afternoon walk. And if you did manage to get in before 1400 - you'd be lucky to get more than a packet of crisps to go with your pint of Watney's Red Barrel.

Ah yes. So far as Real Ale is concerned, it was actually disappearing fast, drowning under a tide of Watney's Red Barrel, Whitbread Tankard, Flowers Keg and other chemical fizz beers. Although more beer was sold back then, it was not all Real Ale - much, if not most, of it was keg (as today most of the beer sold in the UK and worldwide is chemical fizz lager).

Thanks to CAMRA the fizz tide was turned and there are now more brewers of proper beer in the UK than there has been for a century or more. But it was a near thing - as I can tell you from my personal experience of over half a century's pubgoing.