Mark Daniels: Clubcard Pints!

Following in the business models of giant American retail corporations, who swept through US towns and decimated small businesses in the seventies and eighties, Tesco have employed similar tactics in the UK throughout the nineties.

Today, in the twenty-first century, they're going after the villages too.

With pubs failing at a ferocious rate, the Mail on Sunday - not necessarily a friend of publicans in recent times - has reported that the supermarket giant has recently put in applications to purchase at least ten pubs that have been forced to close.

Pubs become attractive to companies like Tesco because they don't require lengthy applications for change of use, as licensing for food and alcohol is usually already in place for such buildings and the article intimates that the sites targeted by the chain are town outlets.

But how long before they start getting into the defunct village pubs too?

With their immense buying power meaning that they are able to force breweries to sell to them extremely cheaply, a fact not lost on publicans who then have to bear the brunt of the difference as the breweries try to make up the losses in selling to supermarkets, and their somewhat cavalier attitude towards volume sales, these supermarkets provide a greater risk to the future of pubs than any competition or legislation we currently face.

Tesco themselves have even admitted in the past that their below-cost price policies could be a factor in teenage binge-drinking. More than a year ago they promised to work with the government to end price promotions on alcohol, but today we still see regular heavy discounting on alcohol in the retail sector while Happy Hours in pubs are frowned upon.

They even argue that, whilst aware their price-policies are associated with binge-drinking, violence and disorder, they can't lift their prices because of fair-trade laws.

Suggestions such as restrictions on selling to under-21s or higher levels of tax for alcohol sold by the off-trade have also been dismissed as either unfair or unfeasible by both the companies themselves and the government. Yet they would certainly help redress the balance between supermarkets and pubs, which are expected to police and manage the sale of alcohol in a manner that the likes of Tesco don't appear to be.

Sadly, though, I wonder how long it will be long before you'll be able to drive through a village and call in at The Tesco Arms where, rather than a nice pint of IPA or an imaginatively named Bishop's Farewell, you'll be given the choice of Tesco Value Bitter or their Finest Ale.