Report

They were easier to find that I though, need to get these scanned, but for now, a photo of a photo, these would have been taked with one of those 'disposable' cameras, so a miracle anything at all came out at night to be honest 🙂    

NSU (They made a moped called a Quickly)  

The The will be in Europe over the weekend, shame as they would've been a great addition to the lineup:     https://www.thethe.com/tour-dates/   Sunday 22 June – Forever Now Festival, Milton Keynes, England Thursday 26 June – Bataclan, Paris, France Saturday 28 June – Tener-A-Mente Festival – Anfiteatro del Vittoriale, Gardone Riviera, Italy Sunday 29 June – X-tra, Zurich, Switzerland Monday 30 June – Open Air Arena, Vienna, Austria

Honestly, our wage budget 'should' be around 24% of turnover, that's the number we aim for. But in recent years it's been just above 30%. We need to get that back down somehow. But that's a whole different subject, and a unique problem for us (and probably other pubs since the last big increase in MW.)  We're expecting a total increase in wage expenses, with pay rises, and NI changes, to be around 19-20%. You're right, in that this will probably only account for a 6% increase in total costs.  We also have a 1% increase in business rates to contend with. And then our cost of goods will increase, as our suppliers bump their prices up. Trying to guess by how much is ridiculous, because we have no idea of the impact things will have on our suppliers. But the major breweries tend to increase prices once or twice a year without fail anyway. I think the minimum wage increases will hit the food trade more than breweries. The food supply chain is full of staff on minimum wage at several points along the chain. Breweries, I think, tend to pay more to their staff anyway, even warehouse staff etc.  With these 'big 3' increases next year, I expect them to account for around an 8 - 10% increase in our own prices.  But on top of these, and we're not unique here, speaking to other pub landlords, we have to start clawing back some of the losses suffered over the past couple of years. £30k losses in a year is not sustainable. We, and many other pubs, did not pass on the full extent of our cost increases over the last couple of years. We couldn't, we may as well have shut the doors if we'd tried to pass it all on. Pints went up by up to 50p in one hit at one point already, that was just down to the brewery increases, imagine if we'd added all of our own cost increases onto that too. This has now led to these crazy losses on our accounts. It's fine for a year or two, provided we can fund the losses (not taking most of our own salaries in our case.) But we have to make money or at least break even, our salaries included, at some point. As we couldn't survive on a quarter of minimum wage ourselves for many years!!! (No, you didn't read that wrong!) So we also have to start adding the rest of the previous cost increases on.  All told, I think we'll be adding a minimum of 10% on to all prices, possibly as much as 20%, but most likely somewhere in the middle. The good news is people will be expecting it, as the media has been full of stories like ours.  (Also, obviously, I'm no accountant, we'll be seeking professional guidance from our accountants before April, as there's so much on the line this time around. Hence I'm not willing to commit to an actual figure, other than the admittedly vague 10 - 20%, until we've had those meetings with the accountant.)    

QUICKLY