It was a ‘done deal’. Then came the smoking ban!

There are some of us that have ideas over a pint or three that we think will make our fame and fortune then promptly forget it after the fourth but then there are others who have the nouse [knowledge and balls] to see their fledgling idea through to the end. Stand up to the plate Graham Bolderson and Duncan Wood, the former a software designer and the latter a electronics engineer.
Their idea was to re-invent the wheel, in effect, they wanted to replace the '”archaic” pub jukebox with something befitting the 21st century. So the invented the JayBox.
Whilst on their third pint presumably…

Their attention turned to the CD jukebox. Both agreed the machine was hopelessly archaic.

It occurred to both of them that…

In a world of downloads and file sharing, where vast music libraries were a mouse click away, a wooden box playing compact discs was about as contemporary as a mangle.

Well I can’t fault their train of thought there, can you?
Both of them surmised that they…

…could devise a better product, they thought. One that would give the user more choice, the operator more profits and the landlord a stream of new punters beating a path to his bar.
The Jaybox was born. The first viable, large-scale internet access jukebox.

And like any entrepreneur with self belief they gamble with their own money to make their dream project come true…

They spent £500,000 perfecting it over four years, finally trialling it in the Globe pub, on Carlisle’s Caldewgate.
Its success was instant. The pub went from taking £35 a week from its CD jukebox to turning over £135.

Re bloody sult! I’m not like these f***wits that like to see someone fail, And I especially don’t want to hear it from those people that never took a chance in their lives, “let others do it, and we’ll do them down”, is their motto in life…anuses!
If you have ever tried to open a business then you’ll have a few tales of woe to tell, just like them; so read their particular problems but do read on and discover why the smoking ban is mentioned in the title above.
Enter the dark forces of politics and economics.

The Labour Government enforced the smoking ban and Britain’s banking industry was about to collapse.
“The smoking ban hit us hard, it hit everyone hard,” says Richard.
“The correlation between machine players and smokers is amazingly high.” [My emphasis above.]

Notice that the smoking ban experiment in social control came before the so called “credit crunch”, or, as they put it “Britain’s banking industry on the brink of collapse”.
But of course this must be a lie, Professor Linda Bauld, a leading light in the anti tobacco cartel, tells us so as she states in her now infamous Bauld Report recently reviewed by the chairman of F2C, Phil Johnson:

...the introduction of smokefree legislation has a net positive effect on businesses”

Listen Linda love, you don’t mind if I call you love, do you…how much do you charge for a blow job?
Anyway I will leave you with the last word from one of these hard working taxpayers but I don’t agree with the last paragraph but hey, that’s what debate is all about, isn’t it?

“We are fatalistic – we are where we are and that’s it,” says Richard.
“You can’t fight fate, you have to accept the way it goes.”

I don’t except fate as inevitable, fate can be changed!

Tip of the old loincloth to Sheenadon from the forum whom I've mat many times at our meetings here in the north east.

Google Tags: Smoking ban stifles new business as it kills the old business, Pubs, Jukboxes and the smoking ban.