'Neverspoons' app

[Cowley]

The talk of "boycotting" spoons is an interesting one for me due to a number of reasons.

• My views on Tim Martin - lets just say they are not complimentary to him.
• The fact my partner works in one.
  • Without saying too much, my partner shares my views on Tim Martin.
  • It is worth saying that the stuff going around Facebook etc about how he "sacked" his staff isn't actually true. But they were originally told they wouldn't get any furlough money until spoons got it from the gov, and he did say they could get a job in a supermarket if they didn't like it. But then they backtracked pretty quickly after the public uproar about it.
  • What it is like to work at one seems to hugely depend on the pub manager at the place you work at. Some seem great, some are awful. My partners seems to be somewhere in the middle which I expect most are tbh! The pay and hours are pretty good compared to other pub or kitchen work (more than minimum wage, minimum number of hours and she usually gets a lot more), and they do provide a potential career path from starting cleaning tables to being pub manager which is more than what can be said for other "lower wage" employers. But the job can be very physical and tiring, and potentially dangerous if you are interacting with the public (one of my partners colleagues was assaulted within a few days of their pub reopening!).
  • If it is a weekend I will sometimes meet her from work if I am in town, and sometimes I end up being early so will grab a quick drink whilst I am waiting (which I usually get a staff discount on because her colleagues know me).
• If you are meeting up as a large group of people (e.g. I have friends from different parts of the country and we often meet up to go to gigs etc and have drinks beforehand), then quite often a spoons is one of the few places you can be pretty sure you'll have no issues with.
• The fact me and my partner tend to prefer smaller independent pubs anyway, and am more than happy to spend a little more on a few drinks to support a local place. So going to a spoons is something we would usually avoid anyway in most cases, unless there was a specific reason.

And of course, you have The Great Western just around the corner too (you can see that and the Price Of Wales at the same time too - I wonder if there is a spot from where you can see all 3 at the same time - I don't think so!).

Really interesting points @WelshBluebird. From my own observations of going into two of our local Wetherspoons for a cheap bite to eat this last couple of weeks I see that pretty much all the original staff are back working and the ones I’ve talked to have been happy to return to work.
Some of those staff have been there for years and say that they like working there.

 

[John Griffiths]

Hmmm. I'd suggest that those people would be drinking half as much and eating (at best) a bag of crisps or nuts. Thus (aside from anything else) not generating as many jobs

The impression I get - and it is no more scientific than that, albeit based on some decades of boozing - is that Spoons have a very low staff to customer ratio (Martin makes his money on few staff and low lighting, I think), and so customers going elsewhere may well create more jobs at pubs happy to have more staff per customer.