‘Tis the season for industry groups to air their pre-budget grievances but the latest from the Licensed Vintners Association (LVA) will be a difficult pill to swallow for many consumers. The representative body for the Dublin pub trade warned this week that as many as one-third of pub owners in the capital were likely to cut jobs in response to further rises in the minimum wage.
Amid a series of Government policy shifts – including changes to sick pay entitlements and the reintroduction of the higher rate of VAT for the hospitality sector this year – the challenges facing the hospitality sector at large are, we are told, grave.
Those challenges are well worn in political and media circles by now. But they are fast becoming a hard sell to consumers who have been badly bruised by soaring inflation.
Much of the goodwill towards the pub trade that built up during the pandemic has been squandered through steep increases in the price of a pint – and almost everything else on the menu – in post-Covid times.
Some of that, of course, is explained away by generalised cost inflation as well as price increases by suppliers Heineken and Diageo. But it would be naive to think there was not an element of profit taking by city pubs and drinks companies – many of which have reported record years in recent times – amid a sharp rebound in demand and inbound tourism after public health restrictions were unwound.
Bar and restaurant sales volumes, according to provisional figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), were down 2 per cent on a rolling basis over the three months to the end of June compared with the same period last year. Poor weather certainly played a big part in that but it would be surprising if the decline was not at least partially explained by consumers cutting back on nights out as the cumulative burden of two or more years of price inflation becomes evident.
Against this backdrop, the lowest paid workers – those who are more likely to spend a higher proportion of their income on essentials like energy and food, both of which have been at the heart of the recent cost-of-living spiral – are somehow in the firing line as the Coalition looks poised to delay the introduction of a national living wage. Meanwhile, the LVA and lobbyists for other industries singing from the same hymn sheet are starting to sound a bit off key.
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