Mark Daniels: Cheap booze just a gimmick?

According to the Association of Licensed Multiple Retailers, as I write I have only just reached a point in the year when I can start saying that I'm earning a profit.

Kate Nicholls, Head of Communications for the ALMR, says that it takes almost two thirds of a year to pay off their tax burden. "With the chancellor's inflation busting beer duty escalator," she says, "the date will only get later."

To be honest, I'm surprised it's as early as this in the year but, with a reported 60% of a publican's income after costs being returned to the treasury, pubs have got to do more and more hard work to bring customers in and keep their turnover up.

Which is why I initially wanted to cheer Belal Hussain when he announced that he was going to buck the trend of rising beer prices and sell pints for just 89p. As a marketing gimmick to get people in to his pub and help hard-up customers beat the credit crunch, it seemed perfect. Happy to make pennies rather than pints, Belal was getting by on an agreement to purchase twice as much beer as his rivals but it later emerged that he was barely making 2p on a pint sold.

Even with a reputed 3,000 pints of beer a day being sold that barely equates to £60 in profit - and Mr Darling and his cronies will be waiting in the wings to wring what they can out of that.

I applauded Mr Hussain's initiative, but it didn't take long for the health & safety brigade to spoil the fun and point out that, apparently, rather than bucking the trend and doing something good for Britain's pub trade, he was simply promoting binge drinking.

And now I read that his pub, The Marksman, has got in to a price war with nearby rival pub, The Explosion, who started selling beer for 85p a pint. Belal Hussain countered by dropping his beer to 69p and now, in a bid to beat competitor licensee Beata Nowakowska, he plans to sell his beer for 40p a pint and cement his reputation as the purveyor of the nation's cheapest pint.

This is all well and good, but I fear it's having more of a negative effect on the industry than a positive one. When news of Mr Hussain's 89p-a-pint promotion first surfaced in the press, my customers giggled and teased me a little about the price of my pint - but we all viewed it as a stunt.

Now, though, with two pubs fighting bitterly over the price of their pints and doing more and more deals with breweries, customers are starting to ask why the average price of a pint in my pub is £2.92. Why, they ask, can't I go to my supplier and offer to do a deal on quantity purchased and therefore drive the price down?

I'd love to, honestly, but I'm a tied-lessee and so I can go and offer to buy ten times more beer than I'm currently buying, but my cost price will remain the same.

The battle of The Marksman and The Explosion is an entertaining one, but it is making a mockery of hard-working publicans up and down this land and a fool out of an industry struggling in the face of financial and bureaucratic adversity

And let's not forget, of course, that even though we might have reached that point in the year when we've finally stopped handing money over to Alistair Darling, our pubcos, breweries, food suppliers, utility companies - and staff - still all want their share.