In 2017, Bryce Elder of the Financial Times ‘ordered’ 217 curries at different Wetherspoons pubs across the UK. He found an almost £4 difference in prices between the cheapest (£5.40) and the most expensive (£9.15) – reaching the conclusion that “the picture emerging here [across Wetherspoons] is of obsessive menu engineering and predatory cynicism”. Six years on, and looking across almost 800 Wetherspoons pubs, has the picture changed much? And in 2023, how much can you save on a pub curry by shopping around?     

The chart below shows the distribution of prices for a chicken tikka masala and soft drink across 784 Wetherspoons pubs (approximately 90% of all Wetherspoons pubs). As of June 2023, if you walk into one of these pubs randomly, there’s a c.80% chance that you’ll pay £9.03 for a meal that also includes pilau rice, plain naan, poppadums and mango chutney. Beyond this price point – which dominates Wetherspoons pubs – there’s a small number of pubs (11) where you stand to pay less than this (but not by much), and more than 150 where you’ll pay more. The chart also shows that:

– Most of the action is focused on four different price points with 54 pence increments – £9.03, £9.57, £10.11 and £10.64.

– There are some prices (£8.55, £10.42, £10.86, £11.56 and £12.47) that only appear in one pub.

– If you find yourself feeling hungry at the Mardi Gras pub in Manchester, you can save £3.92 by making a c. two hour round trip (by car) to the The Elihu Yale in Wrexham (£12.47 vs. £8.55).

This type of analysis wouldn’t be complete without a map. The heatmap (no pun intended) below shows the average (mean) price of the Wetherspoons tikka masala/soft drink combo for each of the different postcode areas in Great Britain. And if you want to find out how much your local Wetherspoons is charging for this bundle, click here for an interactive map which allows you to browse the data underlying the map below.      

A deeper dive into the map reveals that the five postcode areas in Great Britain with the highest (mean) prices are:

It’s not unheard of for national chains to vary their prices at the local level; Wetherspoons itself notes that “we have tried to keep the prices on many of our best-selling items fairly consistent, yet there are variations”. So what might be leading to such variation?  

Calorie counting. First things first, when you pay relatively more (less) do you get a bigger (smaller) curry? It doesn’t seem to be the case – some rough-and-ready analysis of the calorie counts on the Wetherspoons menus suggests that the chicken tikka masala you’ll receive is the same regardless of where you are in the country. From Lowestoft to Burnley, it’s 1183kcal.

Curry on the beach. A Wetherspoons curry appears to be more expensive in coastal areas, and the data informing this analysis was gathered in June 2023. Is this indicative of seasonal pricing (i.e. higher demand for curries in coastal regions during the summer leads Wetherspoons to charge slightly more at these pubs)? This doesn’t seem to be case – a quick look at some equivalent data from February 2023 indicates that coastal regions (in particular the South West) were also the most expensive options for a chicken tikka masala during the depths of the British winter.

Curry-nomics. Some (or all) of the cost of goods, distribution, labour and/or rent (and rates) are likely to vary across the country – and may contribute to the variation in prices seen above. But if there were wide differences in costs across the country, and this were a key determinant of prices, wouldn’t we expect to see a greater degree of price variation? And whilst higher rents may coincide with higher curry prices (e.g. Central London), this may not be because higher rents themselves are causing Wetherspoons to charge higher prices. It could equally be that the higher curry prices are indicative of particularly attractive sites for a pub landlord (e.g. due to high foot traffic), and this allows property owners to charge higher rents to pub operators. Economists call this ‘reverse causality’.

A competitive conundrum. Wetherspoons “aim, with regard to pricing, is to be competitive within the local area”, suggesting that variation in local competitive conditions may play a role in setting prices. Fine-tuning curry prices to reflect local competitive conditions raises some interesting questions: who does Wetherspoons compete with when it comes to chicken tikka masalas? Over what sort of distance, and how does this vary across the  Wetherspoons estate? Who is responsible for monitoring the competitive landscape in each of the c. 800 local areas? And given all of this information, how does Wetherspoons determine what it considers to comprise a competitive price in different local areas?  

Regardless of what’s driving the variation in prices described above, the pricing strategy adopted by Wetherspoons – i.e. neither entirely uniform across the country nor super-localised – prompts a few interesting questions:

– Why not more price variation? Wetherspoons clearly has the infrastructure and know-how to vary its prices at the local level, and pub customers are used to seeing prices vary across local areas (e.g. see yesterday’s FT article on the cost of a pint of beer). But in only 20% of pubs does Wetherspoons move away from the median price – so what is it about this group of pubs compared to the 80% of pubs where Wetherspoons charges the same £9.03 price?

– Why £9.03? The price that appears on most menus is very specific – £9.03. Some digging around on older menus suggests that this is the median price that was being charged in February 2023 for the same dish (£8.40), uplifted by 7.5%. But regardless of whether it’s £8.40 or £9.03, how does Wetherspoons decide that this is the ‘optimal’ price to charge across most of its estate? Why not £9.05, or £9?

– What about everything else on the menu? The Wetherspoons food menu is fairly comprehensive, and this analysis has focused on only a tiny part of it (and hasn’t considered the drinks offering in isolation). Does the price of other products vary more or less than the curry/soft drink bundle? Or do all products on the menu move in a similar way to that described above? One for next time maybe.

Lots of questions and no answers – food for thought 😊.