The ’Spoons in our stats
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It’s been a long week. Time for a quick one?
Over the fortnight to 16 January, pub chain JD Wetherspoon held a “sale” at 770 of its locations. ’Spoons patrons could get a pint of Worthington’s for 99p, Ruddles for £1.29, and Doom Bar for £1.49.
That month, the Office for National Statistics compiled its inflation basket on or around 14 January.
Its brave agents attempted to observe 356 prices for “draught bitter (per pint)” that month. In 326 instances, they found a valid price.
On 52 of those prices, agents left an indicator note of “S”, meaning the item was on sale, or subject to a special offer. That was the highest in at least half a decade:
Of those 53 valid, on-sale pints, 31 cost 99p, 10 were £1.29, and seven were £1.49, making 47 pints total at ’Spoons sale prices. All but five of those were observed at a “multiple” — that is, a seller with more than 10 locations. Based on this, FT Alphaville can reasonably posit that at least 42 out the 326 valid pint prices spotted were probably at a ’Spoons.
Many of those price likely bounced back in February. In fact, across 406 attempted draught bitter price observations (the highest since at least late 2019), of which 303 were valid, 49 received the “R” note, indicating the product’s price has recently recovered after a period on sale. That was easily a record:
Let’s focus on January (for today), and create unique pub ID strings (region + shop code + type) for the 43 on-sale pints we previous hypothesised were probably from a ’Spoons. Doing so, we find 42 pubs that are probably a ’Spoons.
Interestingly, in the loosest sense of the word, having those IDs allows us to then reverse-engineer our entire list of pint prices and see which pints were at a location that we suspect is a ’Spoons.
By doing this, we find 50 valid probable ’Spoons pint prices in January, or 15.3 per cent of the total valid draught bitter prices observed that month. The actual amount may be higher, or lower, or the same.
We checked in with Goodbody analyst Fintan Ryan, who estimates JD Wetherspoon has a roughly 9 per cent share of the UK pub sector by sales. By this measure, it appears at least possible that ’Spoons is being majorly over-indexed in the UK’s national statistics. An ONS spokesperson told us:
[We] do not comment on which chains or locations are contained within our sample. However, we carefully choose locations across the country to ensure that the prices we collect are representative of the experiences of consumers.
Further reading:
— Here’s what we learned from ordering 213 curries at Wetherspoons
— What’s with ’Spoons boss Tim Martin and breakdancing?
— The ONS vs the Xbox
— It’s possible that Pink broke UK hotel inflation. Has the ONS fixed it?
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