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Warehouse VS Korova


djcaptain

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If that was the case, they'd possibly be able to take legal action, would they not?

I see your point about the soundproofing though.

Not much chance of winning unless they could prove it. Also they'd have to show that they'd sustained a material loss of some sort as a result of that. I think what might have happened here is that they've seen this coming down the track and just decided to cut their losses.

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Flash - this is a great piece of work. It should be read and re-read and taught at all the business schools instead of the airy fairy stuff they get now.

Although this applies to the club, bar and entertainment industry - the same principle applies to most consumer goods - even furniture, clothes, electronic goods etc.

Well done Flash. Good to see a touch of reality.

I'll clue you in. Up until the early 1990s around 50% of all bars and clubs were owned by breweries, the rest were predominantly freeholds (independent), with only a negligible amount owned by pubcos.

Everywhere paid pretty much the same for their beer. There were some minor variations between breweries, but not much. Typically for a pub or club to thrive it needed to be reasonably busy and to make a 60% gross margin before costs on every pint sold. That was the generally accepted formula.

A pint cost approx. 35p. With a 60% margin that = 35/40*100 = 87p. On top of that there was VAT at 15% which made the sale price 1.00 for a reasonably priced pint. The government gets the VAT, the pubs made around 52p on every pint sold.

If somewhere attempted to start a price war then the brewery would threaten to cut them off. The breweries would tolerate a small variation in price. Cheap places were charging 80p for a pint and expensive places were charging 1.20. If you went to the supermarket then you'd pay around 60p. The only places permitted to operate lower pricing schemes were student unions and private members clubs. The breweries could make these threats because the effect of cutting off one pub would have virtually no impact on their overall sales. The breweries also stuck together. You crossed one, you crossed them all.

Back then pubs and clubs were considered to be lucrative little money spinners. In some cases they were veritable gold mines. People who held freeholds usually had them for life, and even passed them on as inheritance. Sports personalities and musicians invested in pubs as part of their retirement plans. Breweries were also seen as safe haven blue chip investments.

There was no binge drinking culture. People could safely walk up and down Windmill Brae, Union Street, and Belmont Street all night. There was hardly any drink related violence compared with now.

What they had was in effect the perfect little communist system.

Then some capitalist big ass business knobs complained to the government that the breweries were price fixing. They sold this as the public was being short changed, that if the breweries were broken up then it would be possible to charge less for drinks. The government went and broke up the breweries, they separated pub owning from beer brewing. Big breweries no longer owned pubs. Suddenly half the pubs in the UK were up for grabs. The same capitalist big assed business knobs bought all of them. They formed pubcos. The rented the pubs out at extortionately high rates.

They then challenged the now toothless breweries to preferential bulk discounting. What you paid for your beer now depending on the total throughput of all your outlets. The breweries were not in a position to tell a chain of 100 pubs to fuck off. Then the supermarkets also got in on the act. Now you had the big corporates paying 20p per pint, and in order to recoup this the freeholds were made to pay 50p.

So now you had a situation where a Wetherspoons would pay 20p per pint, factor in a healthy 62% margin and sell it for 60p. Whereas a freehold would be paying 50p and to sell it at 60p would mean a 4% margin. They could no longer compete.

Of course everyone now believed that cheap was best so they flocked to those places and drank like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately there is a tomorrow, it's today and our streets are no longer safe to walk.

Nowadays the price of beer has increased. A big chain will be paying 50p per pint, and a small freehold will be paying over 1. The gap has if anything increased. Nowadays a cheap pint is 1, the same price it was over 20 years ago. Some outlets are still making a decent profit at that level, others are barely covering the cost of said pint.

If you look at a 1,000 capacity site, their cost base (rent, payroll, rates, insurances, overdraft, operating costs) was probably approaching 1M in total. In other words they'd have to make a gross profit of 1M just to break even. If they were selling pints at 2.80 then they'd probably be making a healthy 60% margin or thereabouts, which is 1.43 per pint. So to cover the cost base they'd need to sell the equivalent of 700,000 pints a year, which equates to 153 kegs a week. But if they dropped their price to 1.50 then that would only equate to a 25% margin or a profit of 32p per pint, meaning that they'd need to sell the equivalent of 3,100,000 pints a year in order to cover their cost base and break even, that equates to 675 kegs a week. How many trucks is that? Yeah - I don't think so, you be as well laying a fucking pipeline to Carlsberg. OK in reality there are spirit sales, food sales, door charges all contributing towards this, but for most places the draught will make up at least 50% of all sales. Still requires a throughput of several hundred kegs a week at that price point.

So imagine that your 1,000 capacity site is failing to cover it's cost base, and it's also being threatened with legal action over noise pollution. Now to properly soundproof a building you need to build a room within a room. That means demolishing the whole interior, laying down some huge rubber blocks (the kind industrial machinery sits on), and then construct a room on top of that, which does not touch the outer shell anywhere. Then you need to do some basic soundproofing on that inner shell too. Then you need to rebuild your whole interior. Cost of this on a 1,000 capacity site would be upwards of 500,000 if not double that. And guess what, you'd need to be closed for weeks, with no money coming in, in order to do the work.

But at the end of it all, for possibly a 1,000,000 plus total hit you wouldn't even sell one extra pint. Nobody is going to come along to admire your soundproofing. So ask yourself - is it really worth blowing 1M of capital on a RENTED building, in order that you can continue to fail to break even?

Bottom line is that the game is fucked, and will continue to be fucked for the foreseeable future. It's not a case of bad business brain, it's a case of mission impossible. Look around you, how many independent pub/club ventures last more than 5 years? Even the pubcos are suffering, and they started this whole process!

Adding the cost of live music into the mix is like smoking in a burning building.

End of drinks business lesson.

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Flash - this is a great piece of work. It should be read and re-read and taught at all the business schools instead of the airy fairy stuff they get now.

Although this applies to the club, bar and entertainment industry - the same principle applies to most consumer goods - even furniture, clothes, electronic goods etc.

Well done Flash. Good to see a touch of reality.

Makes more sense than the 5000-pages-of-shite-that-you-probably-wont-need manuals that the business students get in uni.

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all i have to say is...

Welcome to Facebook

How can Riley's complain about music from warehouse when liquid is just next door?!

o_O

Maybe Liquid is properly soundproofed, maybe it's because Liquid's main rooms don't actually back directly onto Rileys, maybe it's because Liquid don't have live bands and the added extra volume that produces or maybe Rileys just don't like rock music.

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o_O

Maybe Liquid is properly soundproofed, maybe it's because Liquid's main rooms don't actually back directly onto Rileys, maybe it's because Liquid don't have live bands and the added extra volume that produces or maybe Rileys just don't like rock music.

Actually Rileys is ABOVE Warehouse! Liquid is in a whole other building.

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haha, there's some tasty membership...

and as for the noise, I doubt that's the reason they closed tbh! how many years has the Warehouse part of the building been used as a music venue/club?

Yet no major complaints until now?? bit sketchy to me :p

New owners/management at Reilys kicking off about it apparently.

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Guest Bob Double Jack

There was no binge drinking culture. People could safely walk up and down Windmill Brae, Union Street, and Belmont Street all night. There was hardly any drink related violence compared with now.

some good interesting points you raise Flash, but I have to disagree with this one. In my 20 or so years of drinking in Aberdeen, I've never seen anything but a binge drinking culture - I think the violence is prevalent solely because of the fools that are now going about and the police's unwillingness to do anything about it without further aggravating the situation. The main reason many young folk go out now is "to get drunk / fucked up" etc. It was the same when I was at uni and in my early twenties - my main aim was to get drunk and then stotter home drunk. Now I can 't even be arsed doing that - I'd rather go out and have a couple of sociable ones, then home.

I stayed in France for a while and there was literally no violence in pubs, yet they were open til 5am every night of the week. Why? Because getting drunk isn't the reason for having a drink there or throughout mainland Europe - its for the socialising aspect of drinking, and by that I mean, chatting, having a laugh, trying to get your hole, etc.

If kids were educated about alcohol better in schools and from their parents, then maybe in a generations time, this will be eradicated or at least curbed. until then, fuck knows. It doesn't help when the 3 most watched programmes on terrestrial tv all focus round pubs.

for the record, i went on a drinking binge on Saturday, so i am an utter hypocrite 8-)

Bob

Aged 34 and 3/4

and no longer able to handle his drink

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I was out under-age drinking in the early 1970s, and there were violent incidents then too ( a few pals got kicked in outside the Palace etc), but they were spread out around the town more than now, when they are more concentrated in certain areas. And they were earlier, with the pubs shutting at 10pm.

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I was out under-age drinking in the early 1970s, and there were violent incidents then too ( a few pals got kicked in outside the Palace etc), but they were spread out around the town more than now, when they are more concentrated in certain areas. And they were earlier, with the pubs shutting at 10pm.

10pm is a much more respectable time to be getting a kicking. 3am can be so inconvenient.

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It was easier to crawl onto a bus and get home for some TLC. The thugs nowadays are probably sponsored by taxi-drivers, or something.

When skinhead-ism was at its height there were a lott of 'bootings' on Union Street, but mostly to the bollocks rather than the head, so injuries were predominantly to the detriment of the family tree, rather than totally fatal. Everything was more civilised then......football crowd disputes ended up with knives embedded in heads, rather than urination on from above.

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My dad used to drink in Aberdeen in the 60s and 70s and he said it was a rough bastard of a place even back then. He told me once he was on Union Street on a Saturday night and there were two lads walking down the street, one on crutches, when a bunch of guys passed them and kicked the guys crutches out from underneath him. The guys mate picked up a crutch, chased him with it and broke it over his head!

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some good interesting points you raise Flash, but I have to disagree with this one. In my 20 or so years of drinking in Aberdeen, I've never seen anything but a binge drinking culture - I think the violence is prevalent solely because of the fools that are now going about and the police's unwillingness to do anything about it without further aggravating the situation. The main reason many young folk go out now is "to get drunk / fucked up" etc. It was the same when I was at uni and in my early twenties - my main aim was to get drunk and then stotter home drunk. Now I can 't even be arsed doing that - I'd rather go out and have a couple of sociable ones, then home.

I stayed in France for a while and there was literally no violence in pubs, yet they were open til 5am every night of the week. Why? Because getting drunk isn't the reason for having a drink there or throughout mainland Europe - its for the socialising aspect of drinking, and by that I mean, chatting, having a laugh, trying to get your hole, etc.

If kids were educated about alcohol better in schools and from their parents, then maybe in a generations time, this will be eradicated or at least curbed. until then, fuck knows. It doesn't help when the 3 most watched programmes on terrestrial tv all focus round pubs.

for the record, i went on a drinking binge on Saturday, so i am an utter hypocrite 8-)

Bob

Aged 34 and 3/4

and no longer able to handle his drink

Bob - I don't disagree that there has always been a binge drinking culture in Scotland, and that there has always been a degree of violence in Aberdeen. It's always been in our national psyche to concentrate our drinking at the weekend, and occasionally to get into some mischief.

BUT people didn't used to be so focused on getting as many units of booze down their throats as quickly as possible, and that's the difference. These days people are attracted to cheap booze. The cheaper the better. I've even seen people turn their nose up at reasonable quality products like Smirnoff and specifically request "What's the cheapest vodka?". That NEVER used to happen. It's like a form of retarded brand awareness.

20+ years ago most bars sold the same reasonable quality spirits. Smirnoff, Bacardi, OVD, Gordon's, Grouse etc. Cheaper brands were generally looked down on as being inferior, and the stuff that people with drink problems would buy in an off license to drink at home. If a bar sold Grants Vodka then people would complain about it! For some reason Grouse was considered to be marginally superior to Teachers or Whyte & Mackay. If somewhere sold Glenn's whisky then... well they wouldn't have sold any LOL.

These days there are bars actually selling a brand of vodka called (I shit you not) Minkoff. Who in their right mind would buy such a product? There is even fake Jaeger out there, openly on display. Yes back in the old days bars did sell stuff like this, but usually surreptitiously by decanting it into a better branded bottle (the practice is known as tipping, Trading Standards actually go round collecting samples for spectrum analyses to prevent this).

The reason you can't remember this Bob is that it all kicked off in the early 1990s. Around 1993 if I recall correctly. Pretty much the same time that Archie's opened *GASP*. You were only 17 then so I doubt you were really paying attention to the situation.

What happened was the dark forces of marketing (Bill Hicks had strong opinions on them) convinced us of a positive connection between CHEAPER and BETTER. It's incredible to believe but most of our population have actually bought into this plainly ludicrous concept! Now just for the benefit of the morbidly stupid, let me clear this one up. A good rule of thumb to apply is:

CHEAP = SHIT QUALITY

EXPENSIVE = BETTER QUALITY

And that's the fundamental truth of the matter. There is nothing to be gained from throwing 40 units of Minkoff down your throat at 50p a throw. In fact, for those that aren't aware, 30 units is considered to be the LD50, the dose that would be enough to kill 50% of us. One unit = one standard 25ml serving.

Also, in my own personal experience (and you'd all be better off without an experience like mine) the poorer the quality of the booze, the worse the hangover, and the quicker it harms you :(

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OBV less strict about topic drift here than "Pictures that made you LOL"

I reckon (many, not all) folk like students who are buying "what's the cheapest vodka you've got" are just recognising that once you've added the too watery or too syrupy coke and glassful of ice there really isn't much nuances left to appreciate in taste even if you were interested.

And of course, even if you only need four or five voddies to get the gumption up to dance in front of people or talk to interesting strangers in a club; buying them at a quid a go rather than 2.60 is a fair saving. That difference can mean affording a good enough cheap night out (club entry, alcohol to loosen up & chill out, maybe taxi home) or staying in watching TV.

(Yes, lots of folk in the UK do go out to get drunk as they can, but it's good to mention the other side & not tar all!)

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Guest Bob Double Jack

you're right flash, i'd have been 17, and thus not drinking, as it would have been illegal

;)

its a sorry sign of the state of the UK in general that probably, and more than likely, most people won't give a shit about the quality of the drink, but the price. you always (most of the time) get what you pay for - if you want to spend a bit extra, you will mostly get better quality. food / drink / guitars / cars / etc etc etc - it's all the same. buy cheap, pay dear.

does that mean all the stuff is poundland is shit if its cheaper than tesco but exactly the same ?

;)

(holds breath and waits to see if anyone takes the bait)

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I reckon (many, not all) folk like students who are buying "what's the cheapest vodka you've got" are just recognising that once you've added the too watery or too syrupy coke and glassful of ice there really isn't much nuances left to appreciate in taste even if you were interested.

And of course, even if you only need four or five voddies to get the gumption up to dance in front of people or talk to interesting strangers in a club; buying them at a quid a go rather than 2.60 is a fair saving. That difference can mean affording a good enough cheap night out (club entry, alcohol to loosen up & chill out, maybe taxi home) or staying in watching TV.

(Yes, lots of folk in the UK do go out to get drunk as they can, but it's good to mention the other side & not tar all!)

This is partially true. I can remember when I was skint buying 1/4 bottles of whisky in the supermarket and smuggling them into pubs, then ordering plain half pints of lemonade and mixing it in under the table. It was either that or stay in. Even then I couldn't afford the taxi home and would have to walk it.

But then I discovered that there was a more efficient way to tackle the problem, specifically Addlestones. After that epiphany it was possible to go out, drink 4 pints, be reasonably wasted, and have enough left over for a kebab and a taxi to Torry all with change from 10. These days it's possible to go one better with Thatchers Heritage. OK the prices have increased a little in the intervening 15+ years but it's still doable for 15 :)

And without the horrible chemical feeling high that cheap crap booze induces.

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It'll never happen sadly, but if alcohol prices in this country were in line with Scandanavia then I'd happily wager you won't get the same amount of hideous FHM reading lager louts and spray tanned OMG-banshees going to shitholes like Tiger Tiger and Liquid if it suddenly became 7 a pint, 6 for a JD and coke, and 26 for a round of tequila shots.

Belmont Street and Justice Mill Lane at 3am would look a lot less apocalyptic anyway....

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  • 2 weeks later...
It'll never happen sadly, but if alcohol prices in this country were in line with Scandanavia then I'd happily wager you won't get the same amount of hideous FHM reading lager louts and spray tanned OMG-banshees going to shitholes like Tiger Tiger and Liquid if it suddenly became 7 a pint, 6 for a JD and coke, and 26 for a round of tequila shots.

Mind you, the behaviour on the boats between Sweden/Finland/Estonia is usually disgraceful (even Tallink's board of directors were causing mayhem at one point!) - and Finns have quite bad problems with alcoholism in general.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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