I like them.

Nice buildings (though carpets are shit)

Get a table at the back, order bottled beers through their app – minimises contact time with the useless staff.

Nice cheap night out with good beer and reduced contact with arseholes (well, at least til you get home X)

It makes more sense to not give **** money than it does not to not care whether they are a **** or not – I do like how the oddest if topics allow you to highlight the forums more interesting characters

It amazes me how many folk moan about companies avoiding tax then go and give them money. the only thing that will alter their business MO [ for it is all they care about] is a reduction in their income. It is a we have to affect these companies. Anyone using them is complicit in it.

I dont really drink so dont frequent any pub. the one time i went in one  someone collapsed about every 20 minutes from Spice use but i suspect that had more to do with its Manchester Piccadilly  location than the witherspoons name.

>Nice buildings (though carpets are shit)

Carpets in teenage binge drinking pubs are always going to be utterly disgusting, a combination of beer, urine, vomit and sex juices nicely fermented for several weeks….

Most amusing that he says social media is bad for you, whilst running a pub chain that caters so well to the Tuesday morning alcoholic as well as the Saturday night binge drinker

I think he’s got a point here, I would say the biggest issue facing younger people today is a dependence on social media and value they place on being liked by strangers leading to anxiety and other mental health issues . Binge drinking and alcoholism are bad but I would say not as bad as the mental issues social media is creating.

I do think maybe others will follow suit, I think social media and somewhat digital advertising may be coming of age and not the gold rush it once was. Yes it works for some , but for other companies it doesn’t but it was the given thing to do.

FYI  – I do like my local wetherspoons, its a cheap round and the breakfast and steak club isn’t that bad.

Bollocks.

You clean the lines when changing beers, well, pull them through, anyway.

You have misunderstood the situation, read my later post.

Very little beer is wasted in a line clean.

That’s entirely dependant on the length (and diameter) of the line, which you do not know.

JY – You don’t drink, but on the last occasion you did, you decided to do it in Wetherspoons in Manchester Piccadilly?

Where’s your next holiday? Aleppo?

I would say the biggest issue facing younger people today is a dependence on social media and value they place on being liked by strangers leading to anxiety and other mental health issues

Sound the off-on-a-tangent klaxon, but I’d say the biggest issue facing younger people is the hollowing out of the economy, increasing polarisation of wealth and the subsequent impossibility of buying a property for many of them.

Would you not agree that’s likely to have more of a negative impact on their lives than Instagram?

As for social media: what we’re seeing is just it settling down after the initial giddiness

Remember in the 90’s? Every company went ‘we NEED a website?!!” without really asking why. Just because everyone else has got one. All this led too was a lot of essentially pointless (and really badly designed) websites. Just because….

In the same way, every company has rushed to set up a social media presence without really asking why, or what they’re trying to achieve with it. Now, after the initial ‘look, we’ve got a facebook page’ silliness they’re looking at it and asking what they’re getting out of it. In most cases, its just people moaning and slagging them off, so I’d imagine that in future a lot of companies, while not cutting them off completely, will scale it right back

Now, after the initial ‘look, we’ve got a facebook page’ silliness they’re looking at it and asking what they’re getting out of it. In most cases, its just people moaning and slagging them off, so I’d imagine that in future a lot of companies, while not cutting them off completely, will scale it right back

Going back to my initial response to the OP, I think companies doing that would be misguided.

Social media has become the primary communications channel for a lot of customers now. I’m not saying millennials are afraid of picking up the phone, but y’know.

Done well, it enables companies to be very responsive and to deal with issues in an economical way in many cases.If we assume a certain number of the disgruntled punters would be clogging up their call centres with unreasonable complaints, they can be dispatched much quicker on social media and the genuine problems can be channeled to the relevant team.

I think you’re both right.

“Social media,” like with websites before them, is going through phases.  Phase 1 is where it’s the Next Big Thing and everyone has to have a presence without really understanding why.  Phase 2 we’re seeing now where the initial furore falls away and folk are going “what’s this actually for?”  Phase 3 will be when most people / companies start to understand the value and implement a proper strategy, maybe have someone properly run their streams in an official capacity rather than giving it to the office junior to look after.

Social media done well is a powerful tool.  It has an immediacy that you don’t get with other forms of communication.  Done badly it can be ruinous.

The Wetherspoons in Oban was decent when I was there over Christmas. Lovely views when the ferry moves out of the way.

>I’d say the biggest issue facing younger people is the hollowing out of the economy, increasing polarisation of wealth and the subsequent impossibility of buying a property for many of them.

Nope, definitely Instagram

#nofilter #lovelife

It always depended on the manager last time I was going in them semi regularly.  My old local, The Tollgate in Turnpike Lane had a special dispensation to charge provincial prices although it was in London, the manager was interested in what he was doing (can’t speak for the food as there was an amazing Gujarati restaurant next door) – ok the prices did attract the lunchtime brew crew but it was better than most pubs around there.  This is 15 years ago, mind, they were riding a bit of a CAMRA wave at the time.

Last time I was in one was Mcr Piccadilly a couple of months back – looked like a sad, uninspiring selection on the pumps (Directors, 6X, etc…) and we got turfed anyway as apparently you can only come in with kids if you eat there, which is not going to happen.

You know that when the end of the world comes, it will look like Wetherspoons in Manchester Piccadilly? And they turfed you out because you’re not allowed in there unless you look like an extra from Dawn of the Dead?

They turfed you out because they were afraid binners might wobble over and ask for a few quid for the bus home.

Cougar wrote:

Social media done well is a powerful tool.  It has an immediacy that you don’t get with other forms of communication.  Done badly it can be ruinous.

I wonder how Gerald Ratner would use it

My old local, The Tollgate in Turnpike Lane had a special dispensation to charge provincial prices although it was in London, the manager was interested in what he was doing (can’t speak for the food as there was an amazing Gujarati restaurant next door) – ok the prices did attract the lunchtime brew crew but it was better than most pubs around there. This is 15 years ago, mind, they were riding a bit of a CAMRA wave at the time.

I was a regular there when I was a student in the mid-1990s, introduced me to proper beer and it was the liveliest boozer in the locale.

Lived there again 10 years later and never went in, The Salisbury down Green Lanes was far preferable.

high5 chakaping

Lived just of Green Lanes

Salisbury is probably the only thing I miss about the area (well that and a huge variety of cheap olives 24hrs a day!)

Lived there again 10 years later and never went in, The Salisbury down Green Lanes was far preferable.

How do you know if you never went in? (-:

Reggae night at the Salisbury, good times.

@Cougar – to be fair you don’t really need to go in the Spoons to know the Sali is preferable ; )

In the same way, every company has rushed to set up a social media presence without really asking why, or what they’re trying to achieve with it. Now, after the initial ‘look, we’ve got a facebook page’ silliness they’re looking at it and asking what they’re getting out of it. In most cases, its just people moaning and slagging them off, so I’d imagine that in future a lot of companies, while not cutting them off completely, will scale it right back

Shouldn’t you have posted that on the Forum Upgrade thread?

How do you know if you never went in? (-:

There are windows right across the frontage, you didn’t need to go in. Says something about how Wetherspoons’ position in the market has changed in most places, as other pubs have upped their game.

Lived just of Green Lanes

Salisbury is probably the only thing I miss about the area (well that and a huge variety of cheap olives 24hrs a day!)

I also miss those seeded flatbreads from the Yasir Halim. And the beautiful veg, never see fennel like that any more.

🙁

Good to add this to the list of things that you know **** all about ninfan.

Hmm, who to believe, you or the mouldy old farts at CAMRA?

I can’t be arxed to read all this, has anyone mentioned that this is about brexit, cambridge anal, and wetherspoons about to get spanked for misusing user data?

>about to get spanked for misusing user data?

Who by, the pro-Brexit government? My money is on not so much as a slap on the wrist.

I meant on social media.

Hmm, who to believe, you or the mouldy old farts at CAMRA?

Well the mouldy old CAMRA farts that I serve don’t seem able to tell that most of the “cask conditioned” beer they swill in other pubs is kept at a temperature that is too low to allow secondary fermentation to properly take place, but then not everyone is lucky enough to benefit from the required palate.

I don’t mind a well-run wetherspoons: clean, plenty of seats, cheap food of a reasonable quality.  I’ve been in more good ones than bad ones – but the bad ones are pretty dire, I agree.

Same thing could be said about good pubs vs bad pubs, to be honest.  I think its unfair to compare a good indy pub with a poor ‘spoons.  I think comparing averages would probably show broad equivalence.

As has been said already – I applaud their commitment to renovating old city-centre buildings.  The Rodborough buildings in the centre of Guildford were derelict all through my childhood until Wetherspoons renovated them in the late 90s or early 2000s.

On the subject of social media withdrawal – this does smack of a tantrum from the MD.  He probably just sees overhead and an avenue for a steady stream of publicly-visible complaints – without any measurable benefit.  But I think the impact of this move will be zero – I think people choosing to go to wetherspoons has little to do with their social media presence, and more to do with their business model.

I think everyone is missing the point here https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/985894538060460033

https://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/wetherspoon-social-media-exit-busted.html

If that’s the reason he did it – hilarious.

If there is one thing we know about facebook/twitter…. it;s that nothing is every really deleted.  Deleting his accounts does nothing to cover up his tracks.

As I said, smells like an MD tantrum.