Price of a pint !

There are plenty of things people can buy that are good value. For instance I'm writing this on a PC that I bought in 2014 and apart from some changes over the years like extra RAM, a new GPU and bigger HDD it's the same machine I paid €1200 for 11 years ago.

That I would consider to be good, if not great, value.

Being asked to hand over the guts of a tenner for a pretty average pint of liquid that I can down in 30 minutes or so is not and it doesn't matter how much some people will try to justify that price under the guise of looking for "value".

If you, or anyone else, thinks it's ok to pay 7 and above for a pint of Guinness, then go with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Diageo/Heineken would do everything possible to ensure they didn't get supply there.

Wetherspoons use UK stock. Results in higher % Heineken and lower % Carlsberg.

I could, but I get bored and like to get out for a pint and food. It's expensive, I'll complain, I can afford it, so I'll still do it.

The price of an average pint in Ireland Pre-Pandemic (2019) was €4.67 per the CSO. It was €5.82 at the end of 2024. An increase of 24.6%.

Over the same period the average weekly salary in Ireland has gone from €786.36 to €979.71 an increase of…..24.6%.

For the average Irish person, drinking is exactly as affordable, and the same “value for money” now as it was in 2019. Prior to 2019 wages were going up far faster than pints. So it’s probably the case that 2025 is the period in time where drinking is the cheapest it has ever been for people alive today.

But hey ho, facts be damned. F*kin Diageo robbers….

As an aside. Diageo’s share price is down 50% in 3 years. Not a great showing for a company supposedly involved in successful widespread price gouging.

Diageo and Heineken are price gouging though, they have the lion's share of the draught beer/cider market sewn up between them and they price match each other every time there's an increase.

On a pre-tax, per-litre basis they both supply supermarkets / off-licences substantially more cheaply than they do pubs.

It should be the other way around - supplying beer in bulk in reuseable kegs is cheaper than bottling / canning beer - but they face an awful lot more competition in the off-trade so they have to keep their prices there down to a more reasonable level.

The price gouging in the Irish market was also proven by Wetherspoons being able to source draught Heineken via the UK much more cheaply than they could via Heineken Ireland.

What you’re describing there is just a textbook economies of scale pricing deal which is almost universal across products where bulk purchasers get lower prices.

The price of pints has increased exactly in line with wages and only very slightly more than general inflation. There is nothing extraordinary about what has gone on in recent years, only that people have forgotten what inflation looks like as it had been absent for so long.

Price gouging by its literal definition is a short term practice driven by some external factors suppressing availability of alternatives leading to massive increases in profits for a short period. None of that is true for Diageo. It’s in dire straits as a company with its share price collapsing over 3 years (when most other companies have sky rocketed). Their profit margins were lower in 2024 than 2019.

There is a huge level of choice for lager in particular in Ireland. If someone wants to produce quality beer and sell it into pubs for less than Heineken, go for it. The barriers to entry are very low. Wicklow wolf is my go to but it’s almost always noticeably more expensive than Heineken. Peroni be another id go to…more expensive too..All gouging?

Unfortunately another myth. Wage inflation has now exceeded price inflation since the pandemic. So people have more disposable income than pre-pandemic (on average)

The usual average vs median argument also falls down here as wage increases have been particularly strong for lower incomes, as have the tax reductions. The minimum wage is up 30% since 2019 for example, so drinking is definitely cheaper for them now.

Of course some people will have done better. Some people have done worse. Thats the nature of an average. But broadly, drinking is cheaper than ever.

These are very easy things to measure and the facts are the facts. People often struggle to process as it’s so at odds with their perceptions. Perceptions on this type of thing are useless because the people who are doing worse than the average are more vocal. They hear loudly from other people doing worse than average and assume it must be so.

Thankfully we have an easy way to look through ‘the dogs on the street rhetoric’…by using the facts…

Hadn't been in the Cat and Cage since the 90's so it was a bit of an eye opener. But, my god, the staff were absolutely the worst I'd experienced in years and I'm not one for criticising staff too much in boozers. Often they can be run off their feet, so I'll be very patient waiting for a pint but there are limits. When you're waiting over ten minutes for a Guinness to be topped up and then go looking for it only to find that behind the bar is empty it can be a bit much. And that's not just the once mind. There was a point where I thought of saying to the lad behind the bar to not bother with the two point pour and just horse it all in in one go.

Used to love Carthy's back in the day too. But it became one of those dreaded "gastro" monstrosities. I'd heard that Kennedys had taken it over. Hopefully they can change it back to more sensible surroundings.

I was paying £7.15 for a pint in a regular pub in London a couple of weeks ago. Dunno if that's increased recently.

Hey data dude, just wondering can you apply this logic to the price of food- for example chicken fillets, potatoes and vegetables.
Has this gotten cheaper relative to people’s earning potential in this timeframe?

I wonder are witherspoons increasing sales much here, from those that preferred our traditional pub. But have had enough, of the robbery...

Well, their three pubs outside Dublin closed in 2024.

It seems people like to complain about high prices, but not enough people actively switched pubs in Carlow, Cork and Waterford.