EARLIER breakfast opening hours helped drive sales at pubs group JD Wetherspoon.
It extended openings to 7am after five years of breakfast trading from 9am, and is now one of the UK’s biggest coffee chains, selling 25m coffees a year and about half that number of breakfasts.
Yesterday it sounded a more upbeat note on trading and predicted a “resilient” performance after the group, which has more than 780 pubs, said like-for-like pub sales rose by 1% in the 11 weeks to July 11, compared with a 0.8% drop in early May, when Wetherspoon expressed caution about the outlook for the next financial year.
It said it had generated sufficient cash to enable it to open 47 new pubs in the financial year to the end of July. This meant total sales increased by 5.8% in the period, covering the last quarter of the financial year.
The group operates almost 30 Merseyside pubs and is investing in new sites, including a £600,000 revamp of Bootle’s Merton Inn, creating 35 new jobs.
