Member Info for sterraman

Ah, now I have obtained a figure for the bottles of Heinz, etc. Let us go back to the USA car manufacturer model, from the days when they were a success. We have a bottle (a unit) costing 50p. We buy a batch of 100,000, which costs us £50,000. We lose £25,000’s worth of bottles through pilfering, so the bottle s have cost us £1 each. We have to buy another batch, sooner, so we lose the interest , at say 5%, on our capital. How many batches a year? 3, 4, 5? It’s all out of profits.

Don’t put more bottles out than you have to, they don’t have to be left on empty tables, and certainly not left on tables being used by non-eaters. That’s how they drift into bags and pockets. And don’t leave a table full of bottles near the exits, as some JDW’s do. Why not put a notice up, help yourself, it’s on the shareholders? What’s it going to be like when every town has its tent city?

Don’t get me on about lawyers, we see the benefit-claiming population and the legal aid bill rising by leaps and bounds every year because of the pound-shop variety, but accountants? Enough of them have been paraded through the courts over the years to give me a jaundiced view. Accountant to school-leaver small-office junior “Go out and get me my Financial Times, and while you are out, call in at the Wetherspoons and grab a handful of teabags and some sugars”. Make a thief out of a school-leaver. Could be your grandchild.

Benefit claimants, well if they are buying meals and alcohol at least they are putting some money into the till. Just don’t give them free tea and coffee to encourage them to sit around , wearing out the chairs and carpets. Café owners certainly wouldn’t. Token drinks machines, one token, one mug (£1.50). If you want more, go to the bar and pay for it.

What Americans used to do when car-manufacturing, and I suppose everybody else followed suit, was they would get their new-model prototype ready and on display, then the bean-counters would walk round it pointing things out and saying to the engineers ‘take a dollar out of there’ or ‘take a couple of dollars out of that’ meaning make the metal thinner there, or use ferrous instead of brass or copper here, or put a narrower tyre on, things like that. They might take out, say, a couple of hundred dollars before letting the model go into production. If they were planning on a production run of a hundred thousand units (cars), they had reduced costs by 20 million dollars just on this before the first car left the production line. In the end that reflected in profits and, hopefully, shareholder dividends.

We’ve got the bottles of Sarson’s vinegar and Heinz tomato sauce and brown sauce, all dear makes you might note, not the Branwell’s stuff from Aldi, all either on tables or in a rack so if you don’t like touching what somebody else has touched, you can help yourself to a new bottle. The difference between these bottles and the ones you buy in shops is that the JDW bottles have wings. And it’s flying out of the place, likewise handfuls of Tetley tea-bags, and the sugars. I bet the salad cream is getting a bashing now the better weather has arrived. Lately I’ve been informed by staff that someone was caught filling up a pint milk bottle at the drinks station.

The only things in racks that aren’t flying out are what you might term the Wetherspoon’s vanity publications. They resolutely stop where they are. Nobody reads them. That’s another thing for the bean-counters to look at. Oh yes, and the CAMRA beer bribe.

Get the profits up and you can put more staff on. That’s the worst thing about JDW’s, you sometimes are queuing to be served, because the staff are multi-tasking.

Adapt the drinks dispensers to take a metal token, which the bar staff give the customer along with the mug. One token, £1.50. Then the bums might return to their traditional haunts, the library or even the missions or the Cyrenians. Get free soup as well as tea there, and help to claim your benefits.

Don’t think that I don’t let the company know my views.

That's disgusting! It's a form of shoplifting. You could maybe overlook a case of a kid on a zero hours contract picking up an empty cup from a table and bumming a coffee, as long as it's only one and he's not sitting there all day, but this disabled man will have his Disability Living Allowance (DLA), his Personal Independence Payment (PIP), his Attendance Allowance (AA), probably his rent and rates paying, one cost of living payment after another, in other words can afford his first cup of JDW coffee, before he hits the free ones following. The manager should have got the laws in and had the man and the carer's bags turned out, and they might have found bottles of sauce, vinegar, handfuls of sugar, teabags, all the stuff that JDW's have lying about. It's not cheap brand stuff, either. Only the best.

Don't get me on about not being able to get a table for ameal at dinnertime in a fairly small JDW, because of all the tables being hogged by tea and coffee bandits.

I get about a bit, and think the problem is pretty widespread, so I wouldn't like to stigmatise an entire county or region. Some Wetherspoons are so big and have so many odd corners they are impossible to supervise. And as for the type of customer, one could always mention the expensive cars and SUV's parked around the street corners from PDSA clinics and food banks.

What do you pay for a cup of coffee now in a cafe or coffee shop? In the local JDW now closed, it was £1.04 and as many mugs as you wanted till it was comng out of your ears. My answer is token tea and coffee machines, one token, or two if you've bought a meal.

One of my local Wetherspoons has just closed, and it always seemed full over the day. However, a lot of customers weren't eating meals or drinking beer, they were drinking tea and coffee. And really Wetherspoons should install token-operated tea and coffee machines, and just give one or maybe two tokens for the cash. I have had it on the good authority of a coffee burglar that people take the mug home in their pocket and come back repeatedly for free drinks. Others hand the mug to somebody else before they go. I've seen this myself. Others sit in groups, and then it's "your turn for the mug now". It is Wetherspoons that is the mug in these cases. The staff could try putting the mugs out at the beginning of the day, and see how many have come back at the end of the day. It's all right to say "it's only a pound or £1.50 a mug", multiply that by a thousand, and anyway it's the principle. Other pubs don't act as a shelter for bums in cold weather.

Is there likely to be any significant news soon, as operations will be under about 6 foot of ice for the next few months?

That's not rust, it's a dark red paint

Sorry, lads, blame me, I bought in late yesterday, price around a fiver, this always happens. Maybe I should sell,
it would shoot back up.

Slide off mate. I don't do keyboard warrior.

PS. The going rate for a pint of real ale in JDW's in my area is around £2.26. I got told of a JDW in North London charging £4.50, while the nearby competition was £6.50 a pint. I'd find something else to do at those rates.

The price advantage varies. In the big town six miles from me, in the North, real ale drinkers won't find a cheaper pint than the one in the JDW, but your John Smith's type of drinker (and there are many) can get a pint as cheap in about five pubs within 300 yards.
The breakfast might be fine in the JDW, but I can get one as good in a market cafe nearby, for £3 less. Sometimes I walk 6 miles over a moor in the early morning to a posher town, and I couldn't get a better, cheaper breakfast than the one in the JDW, but later in the day there are plenty of pubs doing meals. And there is no pub in that town to approach the JDW for the price of beer, but they all have plenty of customers, even at £4.50 a pint. This hasn't changed, even with the cost of living crisis.
I go to the surviving JDW in Putney, the beer is cheap for the area, and they get plenty of diners, but so do other establishments. So there's no guarantee that customers will be flocking in thinking about nothing but price.
I don't spend all my time in JDW's, but I must say that in one or two of the town ones, a lot of potential customers would be put off by some of the other customers. The staff seem to be generally young, and I think that some JDW's would benefit from older managers with a track record for managing rougher pubs.
Just my thoughts. DYOR on the pubs.

What lets this firm down is that you can go in (no shareholder discount,by the way) and you'll see a queue at he bar, and one or maybe two members of staff trying to serve drinks, take orders for meals, go to the kitchens to collect meals, take meals to tables, clear the tables and take plates etc to the hatch, clean the tables, sweep the floor, attend to the tea and coffee machine when it runs out , collect the empties and wash them, etc etc. Mean while the queue diminishes, because people are leaving and going to the dearer pub next door. If this share ever reaches the dizzy heights of once before, I'll be very (and pleasantly ) surprised.

Oh dear, a keyboard warrior.

Top of the fallers league at this moment in time is ITS, down 75%. PANR has improved to be down in the middle of the league.
I am wondering what persuaded me not sell my stake in PANR yesterday for what I could get, and invest
the proceeds in ITS. Maybe somebody is watching over me after all.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question, so to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune etc etc.

This was a share I was thinking of putting more into. Every time my portfolio starts to look more promising,
something like this happens. One step forward, two back.

Top of the fallers' league at this moment in time

Maybe ring up the Chinese Embassy in London, they might know what's going on. They've had balloons over the place for weeks, apparently.

P.S. This is a yearly handout they get

If the the ageing clapped-out beardies can have thirty pounds worth of 50p vouchers out of JDW profits, why can't shareholders? I don't mean every shareholder, but PI's who have held their shares for an agreed time?