London.pm Meeting - April 4th

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 05:38:00PM +0200, Richard Foley said:
> Excuse me?
> 
> They want to charge you for the privilige of buying beer from them...?!

They want to charge for reserving space. Quite a few pubs do - if they 
reserve the space and no-one turns up then they lose money obviously. 
or, alternatively, if we say there are 30 people who are going to turn 
up and they bring in extra staff to cover and we don't turn up then 
they're out of pocket.

The alternative is that we just turn up and colonise an area but I'm 
loathe to do that because it often leads to a fragmented meeting which 
is bad. Also, and this from the point of view of a habitual ex 
bar-tender, if you're expecting a nice quiet Thursday night and there's 
just the two of you behind the bar and suddenly 20-40 thirsty mongers 
turn up it turns out to be a bit of a mare. 

A couple of places have charged us deposits (only very, very rarely 
though) which has its own complications but is slightly more amenable. 

Simon