Wetherspoon chairman Sir Tim Martin has revealed plans to create up to 50 more “Super Spoons.”
“We are probably going to enlarge 40 or 50 more of our pubs over the next few years, in a similar style to Ramsgate and Newcastle”, he told The Sun.
Work on Newcastle’s The Mile Castle is now underway and will include a 26-bedroom hotel and 3,000 sq ft beer garden. Meanwhile, its Ramsgate pub can cater up to 1,400 guests and has the biggest beer garden in Britain.
Earlier this year, Martin told MCA that he would like to see beer gardens in every Wetherspoon pub, and was also in the process of overhauling staff provisions across its estate, with plans to fit new staff rooms and changing rooms into all pubs in the next three years, at a cost of approximately £40m.
In an interview with The Sun, Martin explained why Wetherspoons’ drinks can remain at low prices: “There’s no real secret, we sell a lot of beer.
“We’ve got bigger pubs than average and we’ve got very long-term relationships with our beer suppliers, so they know that we’re not buying it for three months or six months.
“Our longest contract now has got 17 years to go.”
Martin said that he had been inspired by US retail giant Walmart, which used to own Asda, which undercut its competitors on price because it sold more than anyone else.
“Sam Walton used to say ‘we sell three for two’, and that’s true of Wetherspoons. Our average sales per pub are probably far more than double most pubs.”
He also wanted to bust the myth that the business buys short-dated beer that is about to go off.
“I’ve never hung outside the brewery gate waiting for it to go out of date. It would be impossible,” he said, adding, ”The cheapest spirit we sell is probably gin, Gordon’s gin. I’ve never heard of gin going out of date.
“They pick it up out of a shipwreck from 300 years ago, and it’s still drinkable.”
Fresh from celebrating the pub company’s best results in years, J D Wetherspoon founder and chairman Sir Tim Martin will return to MCA’s Pub Conference this month. For more information on the event and the current agenda, and to book your tickets, please click here.
