‘How deep is your love?’, Wetherspoon asks punters
JD Wetherspoon has hit out at the rising cost of pints in pubs relative to supermarkets, challenging punters to continue visiting their local despite higher prices.
Sir Tim Martin, chairman of the pub firm, told shareholders on Wednesday that recent Conservative and Labour governments have worsened the existing price disparity between pubs and grocers by pushing up labour costs.
“Whether this economic effect is desirable is, above all, a question for the public. To what extent does the public want pubs to retain their position in the UK’s social fabric? “How deep is your love?”, to borrow a line from the Bee Gees,” he said.
The pub group claimed that the labour cost in every pint served in a pub is £1.68, with the average pint price being £5.34 in May. This is compared to an average pint price of between £1.30 and £1.50 in a supermarket, of which labour costs account for about 15p, Wetherspoon said.
Rising labour costs have “widened the price gap between a pub pint and a supermarket pint in recent decades, which has been a major factor in pubs losing half their beer sales to supermarkets since the millennium,” the group said.
Wetherspoon claimed that above-inflation increases to minimum wages and hikes to employer national insurance contributions (NICs) have cost jobs as well as pushing up the price of a pint.
The pub chain had backed a campaign for the government to halve VAT for hospitality to 10 per cent, which it says is also behind the disparity with supermarkets, but John Healey did not heed these calls at last week’s Budget.
Instead, the Chancellor hiked beer duty by 2p per print, in a move branded “breath-taking” by the sector. This decision “will undoubtedly push up the price of a pint,” the British Beer and Pub Association has said.
Shares reaching ‘nosebleed’ highs
Despite these pressures, JD Wetherspoon said it is on track to meet market expectations and posted 9.9 per cent sales growth in September, above the 2.7 per cent industry-wide growth recorded by data firm NIQ.
In the last 14 weeks, the group has seen bar sales rise by 9.4 per cent, while food and slot machine revenue jumped by 6.8 and 7.1 per cent. This offset a 1.4 per cent decline in room sales at Wetherspoon’s 55 hotels.
Martin said: “The company has had a good start to the financial year. There are still three quarters to go and profit forecasts are very dependent on the level of sales growth.”
Analysts at Peel Hunt said they expect Wetherspoon to upgrade its forecasts later this year. But they added that this is likely already priced into its shares, which are riding high on gain of nearly 60 per cent in the past 12 months.
Greg Johnson, an analyst at broker Shore Capital, said the pub group’s shares are in “nosebleed territory against historical and peer metrics, especially when set against the backdrop for inflation, energy, interest rates [and] unemployment”.
The group, which runs 797 pubs across the UK, has opened six more sites in the year so far, including at Manchester and Heathrow airports. It expects to open between five and 10 more managed pubs before the end of its financial year, along with between 10 and 15 more franchised sites.
Wetherspoon’s expansion of its footprint at airports follows a row over whether plane passengers should be able to drink before their early-morning flights.
Martin has repeatedly traded blows with Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary on the topic. The budget airline boss has accused airports of “profiteering” from disorderly drinking and claimed his airline is forced to divert one flight every day to deal with drunk passengers.
Shares in Wetherspoon lost 2.3 per cent to 1,001p in early trading.