One Good Deed

Exploring the complexities of the pub economy

The pub economy is an interesting one. I’m not specifically talking about the exchange of money for alcoholic beverages, although that does come into it. What I mean when I refer to the pub economy is that unique exchange of skills and resources which only occurs in a pub.

Or, at least, only occurs in a specific way in a pub.

You’ll all have done favours for family or friends, be it helping them move house, or giving them a hand to remove a particularly awkward item from their garden, or lending them a piece of equipment. Those sort of transactions occur every day, hundreds of times, amongst friends and family outside of the confines of the pub. And they’re done so on the explicit knowledge that the borrower in question is now in your debt and, somewhere down the line, you’ll be able to call in a favour of your own from them in payment for the help you’ve given them today.

In the pub, however, people don’t tend to like to be in that sort of debt for too long. Which is why, when it comes to the economy of favours in the pub, the immediate response is for the favour-asker to buy the favour-giver some drinks. The value of which should be roughly comparable to the value of the work or favour given.

Or at least it should in my eyes.

A New Radio

Now I must admit to a little naivety here. I’d seen favours exchanged for beers many times before I finally decided to get involved in this sort of transaction, when I asked Moose, one of our regulars, who also happens to be an auto-electrician, to install an after-market Bluetooth phone receiver and DAB radio to our recently-acquired Mazda MX5.

We knew Moose well, and had established we had connections from long before I started visiting the pub (more on that another time), but suffice to say we knew he’d do us the job in a couple of hours for nothing more than a couple of beers.

So we acquired the Bluetooth set, handed it and the car over to Moose one Saturday morning, and the car was back with us in three hours, all installed and working. So that evening, we went into the pub to pay our debts.

Now I’ve since seen other people do favours on a similar or larger scale and be paid in anywhere up to five beers.

But as I was new to this economy, I worked out what would be, in my mind, a fair hourly rate, took a little bit off because it was a mate doing a favour, and bought Moose a number of drinks that were, in my mind, commensurate with such a figure.

The look on his face when I told him I’d paid ten pints on for him (roughly £40), was a picture. It was a combination of ‘I’m going to have a good night tonight!’, ‘Jesus, that’s a lot and I was expecting less than half that’, and ‘I’ll do this lad more favours in the future!’.

If we had been living in a cartoon, Moose’s jaw would have landed on the floor, and his eyes would have been simultaneously as wide as saucers whilst spinning round in his head, landing with a ‘ding’ with a pint of beer replacing each pupil, as if on a fruit machine.

I since realise that I probably got the valuation a little too high, based on other similar transactions I’ve witnessed in the pub, but, like I say, I was naïve and, really, it was still cheaper than paying someone to install it.

Mucky Fat

Sometimes, the value of a favour is much easier to gauge. Especially if that favour is providing physical goods. Although, in my experience, there is scale here, and it isn’t quite as simple as buying drinks equivalent to the value of said physical goods. And, at different points, it may be more beneficial to be the provider or the receiver.

For instance, if the item costs a couple of pounds, the receiver is duty-bound to pay for a pint, in which case, the provider has received a cut-price drink. However, if the item is, say, a fiver, then the receiver would almost certainly get away with also buying just a pint, in which case they’ve acquired a fiver’s worth of goods for about £3.50.

As the value of the goods increases, so does the number of pints the receiver is obliged to provide, though here too there may be issues. For instance, you could quite easily nip over the road to the local supermarket and purchase a jar of honey from a selection of probably five or ten on the shelf. Those would range from a couple of pounds for their basic, own-brand offering, to upwards of six or seven pounds for the premium manuka honey or some other such.

But what if the honey you receive as a favour in the pub isn’t for sale. What if the provider is an apiarist and thus produces their own? How do you quantify the time of extracting it, the cost of jarring it, and the danger money for stealing it from their bees in the first place? In the case of home-made honey, it really is a minefield, literally and figuratively!

But I digress. This story isn’t necessarily about the reciprocal transaction of goods for beer, although that does feature.

One group of regulars you’re yet to meet come in on Thursdays and Sundays, plus the odd other day on occasion, and occupy the corner of the bar in the best room. There isn’t time to introduce you to them here, but you’ll meet them soon.

For now though, you need to know about David. You see, he’s a proper Yorkshireman. And I don’t mean he’s thrifty. What I mean is, he’s always had a penchant for what we Yorkshire folk call ‘mucky fat’. Beef dripping.

The stuff that was initially a waste product, that some enterprising soul decided they’d try to fry fish and chips in and discovered the secret to a proper fish supper. And the thing that, in days of yore, folks in Yorkshire would spread thinly on bread to provide a cheap supper when times were tough.

These days, mucky fat, proper butter and nice bread is a proper Yorkshire delicacy. If you haven’t tried it, you really must.

The problem is, David has a wife at home who cares about his health. In particular, she has, in the past, expressed deep concern for the state of his arteries and his cholesterol, given the amount of fat he likes to consume.

So, every Thursday, when the local butcher has restocked, another regular nips over and purchases two tubs of mucky fat; one for him, and one for David. He gets a pint in exchange for his £1.50 outlay (see what I mean about it benefitting the favour-giver?), and David gets himself a tub of contraband.

Said tub of contraband is then secreted into David’s inside jacket pocket, where it stays until Mrs David is safely tucked up in bed that night, whence the tub is retrieved from its initial hiding place, opened and David’s Thursday supper is made. The remaining two-thirds of the tub is then squirreled away atop some high cupboard in his kitchen where his wife seldom goes, since she can’t reach, and is then periodically retrieved, portioned and replaced until the tub is empty, probably by Saturday or Sunday.

Lastly, the remaining evidence must then be secretly removed from the house, so the offending empty tub finds its way, through some means or other, into next door’s bin…

Oven, one owner since new, never used

Sometimes, the value of the work or goods provided may outweigh any attempt to remunerate the favour-giver with beer alone. In such cases, though, another payment scale exists.

Say, for instance, you need some work doing on your car, you may choose to employ one of the several mechanics who frequent the pub. They’ll give you the work at a cut-price ‘mate rate’, so you get your work done for a significant discount. Since you’ve paid actual money for the work, you may assume that’s your obligation met.

However, there is an implicit understanding that this isn’t true. You see, in this instance, the favour isn’t doing the work, but providing a discount. That discount may well be tens of pounds, even into the hundreds, depending on the size of the work. However, no matter the amount of discount, your obligation only ends when you have repaid that favour with two or three beers.

Such was the case for Thumper when he asked Andy to install a brand new oven in his kitchen. The work was done, money exchanged hands, for what I assume was a good discount – Thumper never pays full price if he can avoid it, as you know. And so, the following day, Andy had a couple of pints on Thumper, as a ‘thank you’ for the favour of reducing the price.

Although, we have since established, that installing such an oven was probably not necessary.

I’ve told you before that Thumper has strange eating habits, and loves a bargain. Moreover, he’s constantly mithering about the cost of energy these days. I have it on good authority that, if he isn’t home, his good lady is told that, if she’s cold, she must put another jumper on. In fact, I suspect he carries his heating thermostat in his trusty backpack, which he’s never without. You know, the one which once housed a brick…

So, it’s not a huge leap to imagine that, since the oven was installed, as the price of gas and electricity has risen, and as he tends to have his dinner from the orange-stickered ‘whoopsie’ section of Coop, it has never been used. After all, if Thumper wants a full roast dinner, he knows a great place in Benidorm…

So if you’re furnishing a new house and are looking for a cheap, second-hand oven in mint condition, I reckon I know where there’s one going spare…

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