Imagine a product where you donโt know how much it costs until after you pay for it. Sometimes, you wonโt 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, itโs 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 theyโre paying for something before they buy it. Even the supermarket chains have the integrity to tell us theyโre about to screw us as opposed to letting us know once we get to the checkout.
The lack of transparent pricing on drinks wouldnโt be such a problem if the cost of going out didnโt 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 youโre standing in.
I recently went to a pub and paid $10 for a schooner. (For a moment, letโs 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 didnโt taste any better, the venue wasnโt nicer, and Iโm sure those kids working behind the bar werenโt 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.
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Now, Iโm sure there are valid and multifaceted reasons why the beer costs more at this venue. Maybe they donโt get as much of a rebate from the brewer, or they donโt have the same purchasing power as a bigger hospitality group. Perhaps theyโve decided the 70 per cent mark-up on a schooner isnโt quite enough to keep the lights on and the urinals flowing. Frankly, I donโt care.
I couldnโt give a single shingle about why you need to charge more for your beers, just tell me how much they cost, so I donโt have to put on my detective hat whenever itโs my shout.
I donโt 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 itโs owned by Merivale to guess how much itโs going to set me back. I certainly donโt want to have to ask the bartender how much each beer costs โ nothing is more embarrassing than admitting to a stranger that Iโm financially in a shambles. All I want to know is the price of a beer before I pay for it. That way, Iโll be able to temporarily take the pain of modern existence away without blowing a hole in my ever-shrinking budget.
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