Businesses will have to charge more, but shouldn’t they still offer some value?

The cost of living crisis inevitably draws focus to the extreme: those facing the stark choices between eating and heating, or forfeiting their own evening meal to ensure their kids have food.

I recall a recent sorry snapshot playing out in an isolated Scottish village, where residents struggled to heat their homes, their lives consumed by the latest reading on the pay-as-you-go gas meters. One woman, her breath visible in the icy air of her front room, spent her evening adding layers of clothing at set intervals, delaying the warmest to the end to try to eke out the benefit until, to her relief, it was time to go to bed.

Some 400 miles away in a tea room in the West Sussex market town of Arundel, well-heeled pensioners and young families were mooching around antique shops and choosing where to have lunch. On the surface, at least, the living squeeze may be less keenly felt, yet this is a wide-reaching issue, and even here the effects were filtering through in more oblique ways, with some service providers potentially sleepwalking into a crisis of their own.

Take the tea room in question: all wooden beams and olde worlde shtick, but oddly lacking in charm. At the counter, a customer had just been handed a bill for £83 – it caught my attention because I didn’t recall the menu offering lobster or truffle egg pasta alongside the cheesy wedges and toasted sandwiches (superfluously billed as “homemade”). The customer was also surprised, only half joking as they offered to do the washing up for a discount, and returned to their table to start the stewards’ enquiry into how the bill had escalated.

A bit like this month’s record rise in petrol and diesel prices, which stood at 183.9 pence and 189.9 pence per litre respectively at a service station in the Sussex village of Pease Pottage on the A23, the stranger’s tea-room bill seemed to represent a significant turning point. How have we reached a stage where a (not very good) eatery peddling the usual staples can charge that kind of money with a straight face?

Inevitably, the rising costs of energy, food, labour and insurance were always going to bite. Some 93 per cent of the 680 businesses surveyed by UK Hospitality last month said they intended to increase prices, by an average of 11 per cent.

Yet there’s a balance for businesses to strike between absorbing those costs and offering some value. Surely the onus should also be on the service provider to try to offset the steeper prices, perhaps with really good service and a bit of effort – something all too often lacking in the current operating environment, where the complacency can be staggering.

The indifference of the worst offenders, I believe, stems from the assumption that they will always have a captive audience. Most midweek outings I’ve made to coastal and market towns in recent times confirm that it is the grey pound that is propping up the local economy, whether it’s in the restaurants and cafes or browsing the antique emporiums and independent bookshops, galleries and gift shops.

According to a report by think tank the International Longevity Centre, spending by those aged 65 and over increased by 75 per cent between 2001 and 2018, compared with a 16 per cent fall in spending by those aged 50 and under during the same period.

Yet it would be a big mistake for operators to assume this cohort will be immune to the cost-of-living hikes, and content to keep paying ever more as inflation erodes their savings and pensions. The sixtysomething customer who was charged £83 in the tea room is a case in point. Enthusing over his latest weekend away with elegant friends, he fitted the mould of someone the cafe owner may have assumed wouldn’t be watching the pennies, but his reaction, and the departing comments of his group, suggested that they wouldn’t be returning.

And nor will I. A cursory flick through the last several Tripadvisor reviews confirms that my own poor experience there was fairly typical. “Frostiness” came up repeatedly – a characteristic that has no place in the hospitality environment. For me, the impression was instant: I was left waiting to be seated while staff who knew I was there continued to talk among themselves, without any welcome or acknowledgment. It got worse when I asked to change table away from an open door and a cold draught, and was led to an alternative seat in silence by a waitress with a face like thunder.

I did wonder what specific inconvenience this caused for her, other than picking up the menu and walking a few metres, but it will have to remain a mystery. Service with a smile this wasn’t, and it didn’t pick up even for the big spenders – the man leaving over £80 lighter, whose departing ‘goodbye’ went unanswered by oblivious staff.

It’s odd, after a pandemic that almost brought the hospitality sector to its knees, that some operators seem to have returned slacker and more contemptuous of their clientele. It’s evident in the ever more blurred line between what constitutes a takeaway cafe service and what counts as a sitting-in experience, which I don’t recall being so ambiguous beforehand.

When querying the reluctance to provide crockery in one cafe, which had served me tea in a paper cup and a pastry in a bag as I sat in, I was informed that this was ‘a takeaway service with indoor seating’. A shame the prices didn’t reflect that, as well as the inconvenience of there not being a toilet or hand-washing facility.

I think some of this could be a legacy of the switch to takeaways at the height of the pandemic, and the attendant shortcuts that lazier operators have latched onto without adjusting their prices. It’s a shame that the resourcefulness and effort that defined the response of so many independent cafes at the time is increasingly making way for complacency and excuses.