4.6, 4.6, 4.3, 4.5 and 4.6 – and every one of those numbers is explained by the street outside
This is the fifth Be At One in this survey and it holds a 4.6 from two thousand six hundred and twenty people.
The complete set now reads: 4.6, 4.6, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6.
And we are going to close this file, because five branches across three districts is enough.
The full arc
We began by arguing that identical products produce different scores, and we proved it six times.
Then two Be At Ones in Covent Garden matched exactly, and we reported it honestly, and we downgraded our law to a tendency, and we said we were grateful because it made the argument better.
Then a third, in the City, came in at 4.3 – the widest chain spread we had measured – and we said the pattern was restored.
Then a fourth, in Soho, at 4.5 on the largest sample.
And now a fifth, at Piccadilly, at 4.6.
What the five of them say
Look at where they are.
The two Covent Garden branches are four minutes apart, both in the theatre district, both catching the same crowd doing the same thing before or after a show. They match exactly.
Piccadilly is a West End entertainment site catching essentially the same kind of evening. It matches them too.
Regent Street is a very large branch on a very busy shopping artery with a mixed crowd and the biggest sample. It sits slightly below.
And Monument, in the City, is three-tenths below everything – because the City is four good hours a day, two dead days a week, and a crowd of people who have been at a desk since eight and have no patience left.
Every number is explained by the pavement. Not one is explained by the drinks, which are made from the same recipe by people who did the same training.
The finding, closed
Twelve matched sets across five postcodes.
Three All Bar Ones. Four Simmons – the tightest, at one-tenth across twelve thousand people. Five Be At Ones. Two Cocktail Clubs. Two Bootleggers, at 5.0 from twenty-two people and 4.3 from five hundred and twenty-six, which are the same bar. Two Bella Italias. Two Whitehall pubs serving the same beer. Two bars in the same building at 5.0 and 3.8. Three Prince of Wales pubs.
The star rating does not measure the venue. It measures the gap between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got – and the biggest inputs are the pavement outside, the price on the door, and how many people have already been through it.
Verdict
Good cocktails, fair price, loud room – and a chain that has spent five postcodes and five branches accidentally proving the central argument of this magazine.
What a chain cannot buy
Every pound Be At One spends on standardisation is a pound spent making the product identical.
And the product being identical is precisely what proves that the rating is measuring something else – because if the bar is the same and the number is not, then the number is not about the bar.
It is the cleanest experiment in the entire survey and nobody designed it. A national chain ran it, by accident, over twenty years, at enormous expense, in the course of trying to do the exact opposite.
Verdict
Good cocktails, fair price, loud room – and a chain that has spent five postcodes and five branches accidentally proving the central argument of this magazine.
We are grateful. For the fifth time.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
This is what happens when you’re living somewhere versus consuming it online.