Paul Silcock, landlord of the Gardeners Arms in Plantation Road, Oxford, on an issue facing all pubs
A few years ago a landlord I know was very keen to show me his new fireplace.
“Look at that!” he exclaimed excitedly, pointing over to the fire, the kind that uses gas flames to imitate a real coal fire. “Those four students over there by it, they’ve been there over an hour, half a pint of coke each. Now watch this,” he said, and produced a remote control, pointed it at the fireplace and turned the fire off. You could almost hear the students’ sighs of disappointment as the heat disappeared.
“They’ve only got themselves to blame, should have bought more drinks if they wanted the best seats in the house,” he said. I have to agree with him on that.
I bring this story up to illustrate a different point, so keep it in mind and I’ll come back to it later. (It’s true, by the way. I shall not name names, even though I suspect everyone reading this article will entirely side with the landlord in question, but safe to say he still runs a very excellent pub and is, I suspect, still very proud of his remote control fireplace.)
A question I get asked a lot nowadays in the pub is “Do you have Wifi?”, and the simple answer is no. And it’s a lie.
Obviously we have Wifi. It would be pretty difficult for any modern business to function without it. The days of a good old-fashioned till, the kind which took a genuine effort to ring anything into, which didn’t do the maths for you and probably now shows up on the Antiques Roadshow worth several thousand pounds, are long gone.
Paul Silcock at the Gardeners. Image: Morris Oxford [morrisoxford.co.uk]
It’s all digital touch screens now, with back office software capable of doing everything from stock takes to filing your VAT returns. I sound like a Luddite, throwing my shoes at a Spinning Jenny, and I’m not at all. Everyone hates a stock take. Everyone hates their VAT return. The till system we use is fantastic.
But it needs Wifi. Obviously it does. I can access the till from laptop or phone from anywhere. Card payments? How do you think they’re communicating with the banks? Probably every pub in the country uses some form of streaming service for background music. Jukeboxes now have access to artists’ entire back catalogue, which must be a nightmare. It was hard enough making a choice when there were 200-odd songs to choose from. The queue for the jukebox now must be half the pub long. People desperately trying to remember that song, you know, the one that goes da-nah-nah-na, by that band who almost had a Christmas number 1 back in 1990, or was it 1992? You get the idea.
I honestly believe if I tried to deny my staff access to Wifi there would be an open rebellion. Every one of them needs WhatsApp, Insta, SnapChat, and that strange dating game called Hinge or Bumble that they all seem to be addicted to. Even though its only function seems to be to make them miserable, or have to run off to the bathroom for some odd reason.
In fact Wifi is so necessary I actually have two networks in the pub. Just in case one of them goes down I can switch everything over to the working one, and keep serving and taking payments and telling the staff to put their phones down and get back to work. The fact that my wife works from home (in the flat above the pub) also makes two networks essential, but that’s not the point.
So why do I say no when customers ask me if we have Wifi? Let’s go back to that story at the start of this article. It’s not to be a big old meany who likes nothing better than to spoil everyone’s time. It’s because there’s always going to be people who take the piss. There’s always going to be people who are going to treat the Wifi like the fireplace in that pub. Get the most out of the establishment while putting the least in. Taking the biggest table for the fewest people with the lowest spend.
It’s a tricky thing though. Maybe I could just offer Wifi at lunchtimes? I could implement a system whereby a customer has to buy a drink every half an hour, say, in order to use the Wifi, like some sort of old meter system where you had to put a 50 pence piece in to make the telly work. But then what if one customer buys a pint of Erdinger and the other customer buys half a lime and soda? I can’t expect everyone to be buying alcohol, especially if the reason you need Wifi is to do actual work. Then again, I really don’t want a pub where at 8.30 every other table has a laptop on it and an air of studious concentration.
Image: Pinterest
Honestly I’d rather people just came to the pub to be sociable, and leave the working world behind. Unplug and unwind from our increasingly digital lifestyles. Studies are showing just how much damage having 24/7 access to the world through our devices is having on mental health. You pick up your phone only to be shown alerts and pop-ups of the latest breaking news showing what a mess the world is in. It’s no wonder anxiety levels are rising so sharply. It’s almost impossible to escape everything going wrong in the world, and while we can’t put our heads in the sand and hope Nigel Farage chokes on his porridge, we also cannot function in the overwhelming flood of information and misinformation that is fed to us from our devices.
By the way, just while I mention Farage (barred from this pub for being a terrible representation of a human being) have you ever noticed how quickly Fascists co-opt the words Freedom and Liberty to their causes? An almost dictionary definition of Irony. Please bear that in mind in the coming months. I know I’ve said a pub should be non-partisan, but I was wrong and sometimes you need to draw a line in the sand.
Back to the Wifi matter though. Look, I get it, most people are happy to not have Wifi in the pub, until they’re not. Because you need Wifi for just about anything nowadays. Ordering a cab, checking your bank balance when a payment doesn’t go through, hunting that rare Pokemón (apparently). At the height of the Pokemón Go craze one customer tried to come behind the bar to catch some rare Pokemón or other. Behaviour so daft I could say no to Wifi requests for the rest of time.
So what’s the solution? Sometimes I’ll give people the Wifi code. Usually based on frequency of visits to the pub, need to transfer money between bank accounts to pay for the round they just ordered for twelve people, or to get a cab home at the end of the night. Of course I’m going to let you use the Wifi for that. Just less so if you plonk a stack of books down on a table for four, get a laptop out and order a coffee.
And if you think that’s unreasonable, then you’re probably part of the problem and you should go away and have a think about the difference between a pub and a library. They’re both brilliant establishments, but in very different ways. Try ordering a pint of bitter in the Bodleian and see what happens.
Gardeners World: To Wifi or not to Wifi?
Paul Silcock, landlord of the Gardeners Arms in Plantation Road, Oxford, on an issue facing all pubs
A few years ago a landlord I know was very keen to show me his new fireplace.
“Look at that!” he exclaimed excitedly, pointing over to the fire, the kind that uses gas flames to imitate a real coal fire. “Those four students over there by it, they’ve been there over an hour, half a pint of coke each. Now watch this,” he said, and produced a remote control, pointed it at the fireplace and turned the fire off. You could almost hear the students’ sighs of disappointment as the heat disappeared.
“They’ve only got themselves to blame, should have bought more drinks if they wanted the best seats in the house,” he said. I have to agree with him on that.
I bring this story up to illustrate a different point, so keep it in mind and I’ll come back to it later. (It’s true, by the way. I shall not name names, even though I suspect everyone reading this article will entirely side with the landlord in question, but safe to say he still runs a very excellent pub and is, I suspect, still very proud of his remote control fireplace.)
A question I get asked a lot nowadays in the pub is “Do you have Wifi?”, and the simple answer is no. And it’s a lie.
Obviously we have Wifi. It would be pretty difficult for any modern business to function without it. The days of a good old-fashioned till, the kind which took a genuine effort to ring anything into, which didn’t do the maths for you and probably now shows up on the Antiques Roadshow worth several thousand pounds, are long gone.
It’s all digital touch screens now, with back office software capable of doing everything from stock takes to filing your VAT returns. I sound like a Luddite, throwing my shoes at a Spinning Jenny, and I’m not at all. Everyone hates a stock take. Everyone hates their VAT return. The till system we use is fantastic.
But it needs Wifi. Obviously it does. I can access the till from laptop or phone from anywhere. Card payments? How do you think they’re communicating with the banks? Probably every pub in the country uses some form of streaming service for background music. Jukeboxes now have access to artists’ entire back catalogue, which must be a nightmare. It was hard enough making a choice when there were 200-odd songs to choose from. The queue for the jukebox now must be half the pub long. People desperately trying to remember that song, you know, the one that goes da-nah-nah-na, by that band who almost had a Christmas number 1 back in 1990, or was it 1992? You get the idea.
I honestly believe if I tried to deny my staff access to Wifi there would be an open rebellion. Every one of them needs WhatsApp, Insta, SnapChat, and that strange dating game called Hinge or Bumble that they all seem to be addicted to. Even though its only function seems to be to make them miserable, or have to run off to the bathroom for some odd reason.
In fact Wifi is so necessary I actually have two networks in the pub. Just in case one of them goes down I can switch everything over to the working one, and keep serving and taking payments and telling the staff to put their phones down and get back to work. The fact that my wife works from home (in the flat above the pub) also makes two networks essential, but that’s not the point.
So why do I say no when customers ask me if we have Wifi? Let’s go back to that story at the start of this article. It’s not to be a big old meany who likes nothing better than to spoil everyone’s time. It’s because there’s always going to be people who take the piss. There’s always going to be people who are going to treat the Wifi like the fireplace in that pub. Get the most out of the establishment while putting the least in. Taking the biggest table for the fewest people with the lowest spend.
It’s a tricky thing though. Maybe I could just offer Wifi at lunchtimes? I could implement a system whereby a customer has to buy a drink every half an hour, say, in order to use the Wifi, like some sort of old meter system where you had to put a 50 pence piece in to make the telly work. But then what if one customer buys a pint of Erdinger and the other customer buys half a lime and soda? I can’t expect everyone to be buying alcohol, especially if the reason you need Wifi is to do actual work. Then again, I really don’t want a pub where at 8.30 every other table has a laptop on it and an air of studious concentration.
Honestly I’d rather people just came to the pub to be sociable, and leave the working world behind. Unplug and unwind from our increasingly digital lifestyles. Studies are showing just how much damage having 24/7 access to the world through our devices is having on mental health. You pick up your phone only to be shown alerts and pop-ups of the latest breaking news showing what a mess the world is in. It’s no wonder anxiety levels are rising so sharply. It’s almost impossible to escape everything going wrong in the world, and while we can’t put our heads in the sand and hope Nigel Farage chokes on his porridge, we also cannot function in the overwhelming flood of information and misinformation that is fed to us from our devices.
By the way, just while I mention Farage (barred from this pub for being a terrible representation of a human being) have you ever noticed how quickly Fascists co-opt the words Freedom and Liberty to their causes? An almost dictionary definition of Irony. Please bear that in mind in the coming months. I know I’ve said a pub should be non-partisan, but I was wrong and sometimes you need to draw a line in the sand.
Back to the Wifi matter though. Look, I get it, most people are happy to not have Wifi in the pub, until they’re not. Because you need Wifi for just about anything nowadays. Ordering a cab, checking your bank balance when a payment doesn’t go through, hunting that rare Pokemón (apparently). At the height of the Pokemón Go craze one customer tried to come behind the bar to catch some rare Pokemón or other. Behaviour so daft I could say no to Wifi requests for the rest of time.
So what’s the solution? Sometimes I’ll give people the Wifi code. Usually based on frequency of visits to the pub, need to transfer money between bank accounts to pay for the round they just ordered for twelve people, or to get a cab home at the end of the night. Of course I’m going to let you use the Wifi for that. Just less so if you plonk a stack of books down on a table for four, get a laptop out and order a coffee.
And if you think that’s unreasonable, then you’re probably part of the problem and you should go away and have a think about the difference between a pub and a library. They’re both brilliant establishments, but in very different ways. Try ordering a pint of bitter in the Bodleian and see what happens.
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