Monday, May 23, 2011

Counting the Spoons

The most recent poll asked people how many different Wetherspoon pubs they had visited. I was really just asking this out of curiosity after I recently counted up that I had visited 31, rather than trying to make any particular point. There were 99 responses, broken down as follows:

None: 13 (13%)
1-5: 31 (31%)
6-10: 25 (25%)
11-20: 12 (12%)
21-30: 4 (4%)
31-50: 8 (8%)
Over 50: 6 (6%)

It is perhaps somewhat surprising that anyone who currently ever visits pubs in the UK has not been to at least one, but there you go.

Although I have visited many Spoons around the country, including three in Scotland and two in Northern Ireland, I haven’t visited quite a few in my local area, as since they’re much of a muchness there’s little point in going out of your way if another is more convenient.

I have been critical of the lack of atmosphere in Spoons’ pubs, but, on the other hand, if you’re in an unfamiliar town they are somewhere you can rely on for reasonable food and a range of cask beers that are likely to be in decent nick. Few town centre pubs serve food in the evenings or on Sundays, and realistically you are often comparing Spoons with Pizza Express and the Bengal Palace rather than other pubs. Taunton in particular was a town singularly devoid of decent pubs to offer Spoons any worthwhile competition.

This chap has been to pretty much all of them.