It’s corporate price driven competition killer stuff
I get this in idea, but my actual experience of two Spoons pubs, one in the town I grew up in and the other near where I now live would do little to evidence this*. In fact the both seem to have stimulated the local market, and I’ve seen more business open near them and nothing close as an apparent impact of them.
In the town I grew up, they opened up in a pub that had been closed for the best part of 15 years on the market square. The town centre was very much a drink and a fight place at weekends and clientele matched accordingly. The lack of music etc seems to have brought a diversity of clients further into the town centre, more young families in the day and an older demographic in the evenings. A couple of new resturaunts have cropped up, which seem to be doing fine.
Equally in the one nearest us, a couple of new independent bars specialising more in food and cocktails have set up and brought life to a side of the town that was on it’s bum without seeming to close anything else.
There could be a plethora of reasons why these happened outside of the appearance of spoons, and equally what I have seen will probably not be replicated everywhere, so I wondered if there were any facts to support spoons killing the competition. I get that it is owned by a massive gammon faced ring piece, and that chains can make life for independent’s a struggle. But even when I look to my nearest city in Sheffield I see chains existing and some closing against a wonderful and ever increasing range of independent food and drink providers.
*I can confirm that absolutely no in depth business analysis has gone into this.