Imagine a product where you don’t know how much it costs until after you pay for it. Sometimes, you won’t even know how much you paid for it until you wake up in the morning with a hangover, financial or otherwise. At any other place, for any other product, this business practice would be widely shamed. Yet, at pubs and for beers, it’s par for the course. How do they get away with this?
The price of beer is seldom displayed in pubs. But it should be.Credit: Oscar Colman
Surely, we have laws in Australia that require the price of a product to be displayed before the pint of no return. If not, then there should be, as the most simple protection a consumer can have is knowing how much they’re paying for something before they buy it. Even the supermarket chains have the integrity to tell us they’re about to screw us as opposed to letting us know once we get to the checkout.
The lack of transparent pricing on drinks wouldn’t be such a problem if the cost of going out didn’t keep going up and there were some consistency between venues. Take the same product, pour it from an identical tap, and you can come up with wildly different results depending on the pub you’re standing in.
I recently went to a pub and paid $10 for a schooner. (For a moment, let’s ignore the dystopian world-building that has brainwashed me into thinking this is a good price for a beer in Sydney.) Enter the next venue. It was a similar place in the same neighbourhood with an almost identical bunch of mullets and moustaches working behind the bar. I bought the same beer, yet I paid $13 for it, a 30 per cent premium.
The beer didn’t taste any better, the venue wasn’t nicer, and I’m sure those kids working behind the bar weren’t getting paid any more. This additional $3 seemed to be based purely on the arbitrary whims of the proprietor, who had decided to charge more for it.
Loading
Now, I’m sure there are valid and multifaceted reasons why the beer costs more at this venue. Maybe they don’t get as much of a rebate from the brewer, or they don’t have the same purchasing power as a bigger hospitality group. Perhaps they’ve decided the 70 per cent mark-up on a schooner isn’t quite enough to keep the lights on and the urinals flowing. Frankly, I don’t care.
I couldn’t give a single shingle about why you need to charge more for your beers, just tell me how much they cost, so I don’t have to put on my detective hat whenever it’s my shout.
I don’t want to have to play a game of hide-and-seek depending on the hour of the day, the location of the venue, and whether it’s owned by Merivale to guess how much it’s going to set me back. I certainly don’t want to have to ask the bartender how much each beer costs – nothing is more embarrassing than admitting to a stranger that I’m financially in a shambles. All I want to know is the price of a beer before I pay for it. That way, I’ll be able to temporarily take the pain of modern existence away without blowing a hole in my ever-shrinking budget.
