ABSTRACT
Introduction The public house retailing sector has been seriously neglected in the Quality Management (and, indeed, other) literature as a ‘research site’.1 This is despite the fact that many thousands of people are employed there and that it forms part of the growing service sector, which is projected to continue to expand in the present century. We find this surprising, for public houses are businesses in which the quality of customer service provision is a key ingredient in their success and continued viability. One important reason for the lack of interest (until the early-to-mid 1990s at least) in TQM/customer-oriented initiatives, and for the predominance of a control-oriented culture and management style, was the strong focus in the public house retailing sector upon the products produced by the relevant breweries, that is to say an orientation which saw the pub as the ‘shop-window’ for the beer and other liquid outputs of the same company’s breweries. As some pub managers commented in Johnston and Bryan’s (1993: 127/131) study of service industry strategies:
I believe that seeking a competitive edge through service as opposed to products could have a substantial impact on volume. I really believe that we should differentiate ourselves by concentrating our time and efforts on the way the service is provided; how the customer is dealt with . . . However, I believe that to achieve real and lasting service improvement is relatively difficult and requires changes not only in the pub itself but to overall company culture and central control systems.
