This article was originally published in Farrago Edition Three 2023: Analog. Read the full issue online here.

Have you noticed that something hasn’t quite been the same about your favourite pubs since the pandemic? Perhaps the pints are costlier, the menu has changed, the staff’s smiles appear forced and there’s a certain soulless swankiness pervading the room? Chances are that the pub has been quietly snapped up by new owners.

It goes without saying that COVID-19 was rough on hospo. The sector’s revenue took a massive hit, with dozens of venues going under. Yet, pubs appeared to have made a pretty good recovery. Investment is rushing in—$2 billion of it, to be exact—and it seems like things are stabilising.

At least, that’s what it seems like. The investment numbers obscure a darker reality: many of these pubs were killed by COVID-19 and now corporate investors are parading their corpses around like it’s Weekend at Bernie’s.

Biggest of the bunch is AVC—the Australian Venue Company. In only six years, AVC have gone from owning a single pub to being a ubiquitous presence nationwide, owning over 200 venues. Even if you haven’t heard the name, you’ve probably been to one of their 30 Melbourne pubs. From the whitewashed facades of St Kilda's waterfront Espy, to charming, inner-city taprooms such as the Provincial, Posty and Crafty Squire, AVC has disguised its meteoric, short-term rise by affiliating itself with the legacies of Melbourne's pub stalwarts. The company is valued at $1.32 billion as of 2021 and is continuing to scale up operations at wild speeds.

At the crux of AVC's raging success lies its so-called "local-first approach" to venue management, a community-centric mantra which, while ostensibly innocuous, couldn't be more tactical. A patina of faux-hipsterdom might develop, but the commercial ethos is predicated on keeping the general vibe, so that not much changes on the surface. The veneer of “cool, local business” belies the fact that AVC is majority owned by KKR & Co Inc., an American global investment company with hands in private equity, energy, infrastructure and hedge funds.

Obviously, it’s not great that our supposedly swanky, authentic, and local inner-city watering-holes are run by a foreign multinational. But if they really do “create exceptional customer experiences while delivering unbeatable value and maintaining high-quality standards,” then is it that big of a deal?

Shocker: there’s more to the story than what they’re letting on.

For one thing, “unbeatable value” feels like a misnomer when there’s AVC venues you can walk into and expect to be paying almost $30 for a parma. Or when you realise that you’re paying upwards of $20 for cocktails that, according to current and former staff, a number of their venues premix—even the negronis! AVC are trying to have it both ways: marketing themselves as a first-rate dining experience and pricing accordingly, while cutting corners in the production of such an experience.

Overpricing may be a cardinal pub sin, but it pales in comparison to how staff report being treated at AVC venues. There are the small things: no more knock-offs or staff discounts, for one—a prohibition which, in the words of a current AVC bartender, “goes against the spirit of hospo”. Yet, the problems go a lot deeper.

“AVC preys on their young staff, most of whom are uni students just trying to earn a living in a hospo job,” said one ex-AVC bartender.

“While I was still working there as a casual Level 2 bartender, I noticed my pay checks had no night penalty rates listed on them. I know some of my other co-workers had gone and contested their paychecks, but nothing ever came back from them. Only a few months ago, I received an email that stated I had been paid incorrectly. Bearing in mind, I quit AVC in March 2022.”

Contrary to what they advertise, this same ex-AVC bartender also alleges that the company failed to adhere to COVID-Safe rules.

“In December 2021, mid-service, one of my co-workers tested positive. They were on shift at the time, complained they felt sick and so did a COVID-19 test to be on the safe side. Because we were understaffed at this point, all of us had come into contact with them for more than two hours, making us all official close contacts. However, we were all told to keep working and just forget about the positive case.”

“I told one of my managers I didn’t feel comfortable working, and I wanted to go get tested. I left work early. I tested positive two days later. Within the next two weeks, basically every member of staff tested positive. Who knows how many customers did as well?”

Yet, what remains most disconcerting is the systemic issue that the ascendancy of AVC represents: locally-owned hospo venues being forced to sell because they lack the support to survive. Melbourne talks a big game as a city about loving the pub, but there’s a passive ignorance to the policy failure unravelling before everybody’s eyes: the industry is so destabilised that there’s increasingly only room for these oligopolistic corporate giants.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a city changing: not every pub needs to last forever. But what AVC’s growing prominence reflects is a society which wasn’t able to protect its own and is now ceding more and more ground to the homogenising facelessness and rampant exploitation of the multinational corporation. If we keep it up, then the future looks like overpriced pints in bars with brick walls forever.