I’ve just posted a comment on Ed’s latest post and it that reminded me of my student drinking days, when our favourite Manchester pub (the Hogshead as was, now the English Lounge) used to regularly run brewery-sponsored loyalty-card promotions of the ‘buy a pint, get your card stamped, collect 15 stamps, get a free t-shirt’ variety. Which was fantastic when you were a student who was far more interested in buying beer than shopping for clothes, I can tell you.

Which got me thinking: why doesn’t anyone do ‘drink X pints, get a freebie’ promotions any more? Haven’t seen anything like that for years. I’m guessing it’s because the idiot kill-joys industry watchdogs at the Portman Group would complain that this sort of thing encourages binge drinking and irresponsible consumption of alcoholic beverages (whilst turning their usual blind eye to the ’20 cans of wife-beater for a tenner’ promotions stacked high in the supermarkets, of course).

Or is it just too expensive for smaller, independent brewers to organise the required volume of t-shirts and get them out to participating outlets, while the bar-wossnames and karaoke-123s down the road are actually waving around handfuls of free t-shirts just to drag in as many 3-for-2 fizzy-lager swillers as they can fit through the door?

Or am I just drinking in the sort of pubs that don’t need to bother with that sort of nonsense to inspire loyalty in their customers?