Left over —
Left at the end —
The traffic light Tight
- The beer
- The month
- The traffic light
- Did you know?
Step 1 of 4
What’s left of a beer?
A beer costs what it costs. But who owns the money once it has crossed the bar? Drag the price.
This is an example calculation, not bookkeeping. Every pub has a different rent, different prices, different customers. What comes out of it is a sense of where the money goes in your local.
- VAT — 19%, which goes to the tax office.
- Stock — The keg, the brewery, the delivery.
- The landlady’s wage —[Assumption] A normal wage for the person behind the bar. Open five evenings a week and that is full-time work — spread across a single glass, it comes to this.
- Casual staff —[Assumption] Added as soon as one person behind the bar can no longer keep up.
- Rent — Rent for the room you are sitting in.
- Energy — Cooling, lighting, heating, the glasswasher.
- Other — Insurance, the GEMA music licence, cleaning, accountancy.
0.4 litres, over the bar
Of —, the pub keeps about —.
The sums only work out from — upwards.
The costs above are fixed: the brewery, the rent and the electricity do not get more expensive just because the beer does. And the landlady stands behind the bar whatever a glass costs — her wage is therefore a cost line like any other, not a remainder. Charge more and you keep the mark-up, minus VAT.[Assumption]
The — in wages is neither profit nor guesswork: it is the hourly rate the official statistics give for pub landladies, spread across the glasses that cross the bar in an evening. The quieter the night, the more her hour costs each single glass.[Assumption]
The whole week
Now the whole pub: how many customers come in, how often it is open. Set it to what you know from your own local.
Adjust drinks per customer
Two beers, a schnapps, another beer — that makes four.
That comes to — per customer in an evening.
This pub is too big for our calculation. At this volume it is a business with employees, a rota and a kitchen — the figure that follows no longer holds up, it is only a small pub’s sums carried on.
What is left at the end.
In this calculation the landlady draws a normal wage, like any other employee. What is missing or left over after that is the pub’s result.
In this example: — a month.
The landlady’s wage is already paid out of this — — per hour worked.[Assumption]
An example calculation — your own pub does its sums differently.
This is not an arithmetic error and not a badly run place. In many small pubs the sums come out exactly like this: the landlady works the whole month, and her wage is not in there at the end.
One month, rounded
- Takings[Assumption] —
- VAT —
- Stock —
- The premises[Assumption] — Rent, energy, insurance, cleaning. The same fixed amount per glass as in step 1, times the quantity. —
- Casual staff[Assumption] — If more drinks have to cross the bar in an hour than one person can manage, extra help is added. —
- The landlady’s wage[Assumption] — An opening day is a full working day — six hours behind the bar, the rest before and after: kegs, stock runs, cleaning, the till. At five evenings a week that is a full-time job. —
Based on six opening hours in the evening. The working day is longer — kegs, stock runs, cleaning, the till. Open five evenings a week and that is full-time work: — gross a month.[Assumption][Assumption]
When does it pay?
Every pub has a point where it starts to pay. That point can be worked out: how many drinks have to cross the bar in an hour?
Tight
Enough to survive on, not enough to live on.
The light would turn green at — customers an evening — or at a beer price of —.
The light would turn green at — customers an evening.
The light would turn green at a beer price of —.
“Needed” means: the premises are paid for, so is the help behind the bar, and the landlady’s wage of — an hour is covered. For the minimum wage of — an hour, — drinks per hour are enough.
At this price no amount of custom saves the sums. As soon as one person can no longer keep up alone, the extra help costs more than the extra drink brings in.[Assumption]
As a rule of thumb: for a pub to feed a family, it needs around 150 regulars — a catchment area of 2,000 to 3,000 residents.[Assumption][Assumption]
Did you know?
On average, three pubs close in Germany every day.
Since 2002 their number has more than halved: from around 46,500 to about 21,800.
Where pubs close, a place loses more than beer. The best evidence we found comes from Britain: after pub closures, support for right-wing populist parties rose there by 4.3 percentage points. There is no comparable study for Germany.
The sums you just did are not a one-off. They are the reason why there are three fewer every day.
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