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Saturday 10 January 2009

Drinking less - part 2

A couple of days ago I suggested that the price of alcohol does not effect how drunk people are on a Saturday night. More correctly - that increasing the price will not result in less trouble in our town centres.

Obviously that's not quite true. If beer was £200 a pint then we'd have a very limited number of takers. But that's stealth prohibition by tax, which is a daft. You might as well just ban it.

But we must accept that prices will increase as trouble decreases. This extra margin must be taken by the landlords, and not by the taxman.

This is a crucial, crucial point. If you increase tax to decrease demand, then landlords sell less volume, with the same margin on each pint - this means a lack of takings. Cue closure of lots of pubs.

Recently in Bulgaria and Greece we found drinks to be more expensive in bars but much cheaper in supermarkets. Less tax was responsible for the latter, and the former was due to the bar owners expectation. They didn't expect us to have more than one drink. We bought a glass of wine and got a table for the evening. Try that in the UK and you'll be accused of "nursing" your pint.

The problem this gives me is that it's lead me down a logically argument towards price fixing and tariffs - which is not an area I'm comfortable with at all.

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