Dry cleaners hurt by smoking ban

[The Straight Story]

Dry cleaners hurt by smoking ban

Johnson has blamed last year's ban on smoking in pubs for a tumble in profits at its dry cleaning chain.

Its dry cleaning business saw profits fall 28% to £1.8m in the six months to 30 June as customers' clothes no longer reek of stale smoke after a night out.

Johnson operates more than 500 stores under the Johnson Cleaners and Jeeves of Belgravia brands.

The smoking ban came into effect in July 2007 and has also harmed business at pub chains.

"The smoking ban has now been effective for over 12 months and...this has impacted dry cleaning volumes," the firm said.

Overall profits at Johnson fell 80% to £400,000 in the six-month period, largely due to a poor performance at the company's facilities management business, which lost a key client.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7605805.stm

[Forkboy]

1. Oh well.

We'll just have to be sloppier eaters.

[jakem]

2. another good point made by headline-

DO NOT SMOKE THE DEODERANT!!

whether or not you are a dry cleaner!

[dipsydoodle]

3. That's the UK

and as I'm here I can at least associate with the article.

In due course there will probably be an even bigger impact if people need to chose between dry cleaning and eating what with the price of food visibly escalating.

[Tempest]

4. I bet the ban had less to do with it than Britain's economy collapsing

The British economy ground to a halt between April and June, ending nearly 16 years of continuous growth.

The government reported Friday that the economic performance is below the modest 0.2 percent growth that the Office for National Statistics had predicted.

In the midst of the worst housing crash for 30 years, Britain's construction industry was hit the hardest, the national statistics office said, with construction output falling 1.1 percent.

Meanwhile, manufacturing output fell by 0.8 percent.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/08/22/britain.economy.slow.ap/


-----------------------

...the governor of the Bank of England says that growth will be flat for a year. Sterling has lost 15% of its trade-weighted value over the past year, and 5% over the past month. Consumer-price inflation is widely expected to hit 5% this year (more than twice its official target), though the sharp drop in oil prices may blunt that spike. Unemployment is edging up. And the housing market is collapsing: prices have fallen by 11% in a year, and the number of new mortgage approvals in July was 71% lower than the same month last year.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12070800