What has happened to the great British pub? You might have thought that running a pub was a pretty straightforward matter: pull the pints, collect the money. But it is a much harder job than it looks. Pub managers find themselves under particular pressure. An intense debate surrounds the different kinds of relationships that the owners of pubs have with the people running them. There is little agreement as to which approach works best.
In Britain, pub ownership comes in three forms. There are so-called “freehouses” (about a third of the market), which are owned and managed by the licensee. There are “managed houses” (a sixth of the market), which are owned by a pub company or a brewery, and employ managers and staff to run them. And there are tenanted or leased pubs (about half of the entire market), which are owned by a pub company or a brewery, and receive rent from licensees who run the premises, in theory, as their own business.
Ownership structures matter. You can see immediately that managing these different kinds of businesses are distinct tasks. The manager of a freehouse has a clear sense of ownership. It is his or her business and nobody else's. The person running a managed house is an employee of the pub company or brewery and is part of a larger whole. It should be possible for the pub manager to establish some sort of corporate feeling or identity and for his or her employees to work towards a common goal.