Hey guys, I have a story to tell. So, a few years ago me and my team bought out the biggest pub in town. It had been massively successful previously but we figured there's a few things we can tweak to generate more profits.
First of all, we figured out we make significantly more off people who are problem drinkers. The moderate drinkers takes up space in the pub and just don't contribute as much to the bottom line. Also, many of the problem drinkers don't like them. I mean, think about it. It's a Tuesday night and you're looking to do some proper liver damage and there's some prick at the other end of the table who is still nursing his third pint.
So what we did was, we changed the pricing so that the non problem drinkers end up paying two or even three times as much for their drinks. We then charged the problem drinkers less with a view to encouraging them to get into a right state. The regulators had a problem with these practices at the time and deemed them 'predatory' but we figured, **** it, we'll chance our arm and see what happens.
Some of the moderate drinkers left as you would expect but we figured we can do more. So, we tried to make our offering as addictive as possible. We came up with a few innovations to make this a reality. My personal favourite was 'Beat the Pint'. Basically you get five minutes to drink it and you get it for half price.
We also looked at ways to reduce costs. We had a group of affiliates which had helped grow our business and we decided we weren't going to honour our contracts to them coz **** em. Also, we had Dawn who worked the phones and would take care of the bookings. What we did was, we shipped Dawn off to some Eastern European country where we only have to pay her half as much. Only problem was the infrastructure wasn't as well set up there so she has difficulty doing her job and the customers would end up waiting weeks or months for her to get back to them. But look, **** em. If they don't like it, they can always take their business elsewhere.
In the beginning, it looked like things were working out as planned but over time the customers got annoyed and stopped coming and when they were here, they weren't drinking as much. Not just the moderate drinkers but the problem drinkers got fed up as well.
We once had an almost monopoly on the town but now there a few pubs which have opened up which are taking more and more of our business, most notably WhiskeyBros and GGuinness.
It seems clear we've made some mistakes and I myself have been out of the picture for a few years now. There's new management who have just taken over and in fairness to them, they seem like a decent bunch of lads. Maybe they can turn the ship around and restore the business and the brand by treating everyone fairly, the employees, the business partners, the customers who don't have a drinking problem and the ones who do.
Who the f is Dawn?
You wanted to keep the problem drinkers even induce them with your stupid happy hour. And get rid of the moderate drinkers. It should have been reversed. That's very irresponsible sir. Glad they stopped you.
Enjoyed the read. Stripping out all of your costs with a “**** the future” mentality is normally the thing you do when prepping for exit. Except these guys did it right away.
Must be a weird place to work. You always got the impression that people working at Stars enjoyed working for the company pre-takeover. That can’t be the case today. For every next step taken towards misleading and scamming customers, you would be questioning what the hell you were doing working for such a company.
I knew a guy who frequented that bar. He didn’t like the changes the new management made. Instead of just going to a new bar, he made up a dumb metaphorical story about it and posted it on a bar website under a burner account.
I wrote up a story and placed it in the "Culture" section, as the OP's tale seems very similar to something that occurred in the online poker industry a little while back.
