Espresso: Why Gen Z Not Drinking Is a Load of B*llocks - Oisin Rogers, The Devonshire

0:00I actually have a theory that that's a load of bollocks. which is that people are crying wolf about the fact that people aren't drinking anymore and that people aren't having lunch anymore because some restaurants aren't doing well at lunchtime and some pubs aren't selling a lot of booze and there is loads of marketing and babble about people moving completely over to 0 % beer. I don't see it. I just don't see it. I don't know what's happening. Well, you wouldn't sit at a pub. Well, I mean, for every 20 ,000, by the way, our Guinness Zero is delicious. And I drink it all the time. And it's really great because I can use it as a placebo.

0:41Do you do a bit of zebra-stripe drinking as well? Occasionally, yeah, I do. And I also have semi-skimmed, which is you get a zero up to two thirds and then you top it up with the real stuff occasionally. That's fucking good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Semi-skimmed Guinness. It's a fabulous drink. And honestly, we did a blind tasting with six journalists here, drinks journalists. And we gave them zero against the regular Guinness. And not one of them got it correct. They all thought the zero was the alcoholic. So as a drink, it's perfect. And it works really well. But for every 20 ,000 pints of Guinness we sell, and that's about what we sell a week.

1:19Yeah. We sell between three and 500 pints of zero. Zero. So it is little proportion. you know, in terms of, and for the market to be going, oh, we're all fucked because everyone's drinking zero. It's just not the case. By the way, I mean, in fairness to John Hegarty, what he was saying is that the discretionary time and the boozy luncheon advertising was what made it, was where you got the remarkable breakthroughs. Basically, what he was saying is, I think that the idea of, we were saying that ideas need to have sex. That was kind of this Matt Ridley's thing, right? Ideas need to have sex. And basically, if you go into Bernal...

1:56It's serendipity. Serendipity. You go into a boardroom, which is full of glass, and there's a thing there. It's like trying to have sex with a straitjacket on. Do you know what I mean? It's just the ideas can't spread. Nothing wrong with that. And really minor fallacies here. You've offended the entire bondage community. The entire bondage community now has been absolutely outraged. But anyway, he was saying the ideas can't spread, and I think the thing with the lunch is it created this, almost as a separate point to the the rise of the alcohol alcohol free movement but how would you say in terms of creative ideas kind of booze is um laces that trait to that i think uh if you uh take the advertising industry i think if you get rid of the 10 of waste uh okay which is ostensible waste okay in other words people doing things for which they aren't but which aren't specifically billable or demanded from a client.

2:52If you take away the 10, 20 % of discretionary time and money, okay, it's no longer the advertising industry, nor is it a rewarding place in which to work. So what happens is that in the efforts to cut costs, those things which are magical, discretionary, unnecessary, are the first to get cut. But actually, it's the icing on the cake, without which you haven't got much of a cake. Okay? And it's very complicated because the real... I won't go into this because this isn't an advertising podcast, but I can do a separate whole session on this, that actually John's absolutely right. Incidentally, you're absolutely right in the sense that I've also read some better demographic analysis on all that stuff that Gen Z don't drink.

3:44I think there's a huge bias. in the media to say because something new has come along that everybody's doing the new thing, you know? And the old thing is now dead and gone. And I think it's a bias. It's a complete bias. Yeah, and it's just not true. I mean, I always think that. There is one thing which I think is the decline in the really heavy drinker. Well, there's no doubt. But that's a good thing, right? That's a good thing. That's a good thing. Yeah. In other words, you know, there would have been people routinely, okay um 20 i mean companies would employ people 20 30 years ago because i've worked with some of them who are basically high functioning alcoholics yeah and he went he said if you got if you're going to brief them go in the morning because they're not much use after lunch now sometimes by the way those people were very good in other ways but you it would be much much harder to maintain uh uh i mean there's there's a famous but i think once once again yes we we remember those and we know them and they all became a little bit famous and you know they became like rat pack and whatever but they were a tiny proportion of the people doing the work also i think it was very very time consuming to be that heavy a boozer yeah yeah yeah that you had to be a journalist i was talking to the taxi driver who brought me here and she said my i'm not giving away anything she said my dad worked for cid and he became an alcoholic because the criminal investigation department sort of scotland yard because a lot of his work was basically observation and so your job involved being in a pub for hours every day and effectively you know there were a lot of jobs where you either had a huge amount of time and football was often getting into trouble with this because you actually got a lot of money and a lot of spare time two months free yeah that's what espresso sponsors unleashed are offering they are supply chain gurus and offer inventory management that talks to your e-com and accounting software it's helped islands cut admin time in half get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability brands like candy kittens tarquins gin minor figures and trip all use unleashed and i reckon you should too as i said two months free in the show notes click there and you're gonna get two months for free