Stories
What little I learned in college was not in class but the betting shop.
Studying journalism in Dublin City University, out of having too many hours to fill, despite having no interest in horses, I found myself in BoyleSports in Whitehall of a day long forgotten. Life would never be the same.
It had one obvious advantage: being considerably warmer than the squalor in which I lived, which would have made the house in Withnail And I seem like something out of Grand Designs. When there was strong evening racing, that betting shop would teem with characters, many of whom soon knew me by name. I went to the weddings of four men who I met in that bookmakers. One, the late John Walsh, introduced me not only to racing but to owning horses.
Then there was The Greek, who knew how to bet heavy. There was the politician’s husband; the car dealer who bet in thousands; the Asian man with no English but a fondness for whiskey.
That betting shop, like so many around Ireland, was where gamblers became friends and had several laughs at each other’s expense – while expenses went over the counter. Twenty years on, such shops scarcely exist.
BoyleSports is one of the few notable independent bookmakers left. Stan James is long gone, William Hill having followed them, leaving the high street to Paddy Power and Ladbrokes, themselves having become merely a part of something much bigger.
Everyone is on their phone, some betting shops are operating at roughly a third of turnover pre-Covid and a lot of people don’t carry cash anymore. What does the future hold?
Where have all the gamblers gone?
Online, obviously, but some shops have been able to stomach that, presuming they have an online presence, which smaller independent shops do not. Paddy Power, once the face of that firm, has long stressed that shop-front signage is valuable advertising for the brand, whilst shops also cater for people who do not want betting activity featuring on their bank statements, so they deposit into their account in a shop instead.
Colin McHugh of Ladbrokes is well-educated in the world of betting shops. Ladbrokes Ireland’s racecourse manager, he is a veteran of the game, and manned Galway’s High Street Shop during race-week recently, having ample time to observe an industry in transition if not crisis.
“Social distancing is basically horrendous at the moment. Look at High Street: it’s a tiny shop floor but huge footfall with what I count to be 26 pubs around the area, all of which were closed until the Monday of Galway,” he says.
“For the week of Galway, we had huge ventilation, the front door open, and a rotation of lads in and out but you can’t do that every day.”
According to McHugh, a staggering percentage of income in some shops is lotto betting.
During the Lions’ Test last Saturday, McHugh nearly had to rub his eyes when he saw five lads come in from a pub nearby to place bets on the first try scorer: “That type of thing wasn’t there in recent months. That’s the lifeblood of retail: the pub next door. The lifeline of pub is a good working-class area with a pub the betting shop has nearly to itself.”
Since betting shops closed in March of last year, and pubs went the same way, many towns and cities have become eerily quiet. Dublin city centre, in particular, has bordered on an apocalyptic scene. Having worked in the area, I often spent some of my lunch in the Paddy Power on Amiens Street, a shop that had the distinction of closing in the evening because it was so reliant on the suits from the nearby IFSC.
“The people who used to go to the office who now work from home are a massive loss to certain shops,” McHugh goes on. “Then you have the elderly, who use the shops as a social thing, but are probably still wary and it’s not the norm right now to spend very much time in the shop.
“So a lot of those people are gone. And the killer has been the pubs.
“Eight years ago I did a survey for Ladbrokes, going from Donegal to Limerick to observe all our shops in that region over a period of time to get a feel for what I thought was working. The conclusion was clear: stop opening shops on the main streets and start opening them in working-class areas with leisure cash floating around and with a pub nearby.”
An insider in another firm said that “shops in affluent areas are not worth shit. All you get is savvy punters trying to get bets on.”
According to Sharon Byrne, chairperson of the Irish Bookmakers Association, “the majority of those lost to the shops have simply moved online. The average shop is losing money at the moment”.
Burned at the stake
Betting-shop stakes probably reached their zenith during the Celtic Tiger and never recovered from its collapse. Last weekend, a friend tried to place four €50 bets in a shop. There was nobody in the shop apart from the two staff, one of whom rang the head office, where she was told not to take the bets. My friend left and, as it turned out, he saved €200.
Since the start of last year, anti-money laundering rules have compelled bookmakers to seek ID from anyone who wins €2,000 or more as a legal requirement. One source who owned betting shops said: “This has unquestionably cost the bookmakers some big customers,” while McHugh says that the bookmakers have been “over-compliant”.
He said: “It is nearly like we got a threat of bad practise for years from the Gambling Commission. You would have lads on a stag pool together €800, for example, and they place that on a 6-4 chance that wins. When you have to pay out it’s holy war in a shop. You can’t pay until you’ve proof of ID and even proof of address. Who has that?”
“Right now, the average shop is not profitable, trading in the red, with turnover a minimum of 40 per cent down since 2019.”
Sharon Byrne
Betting patterns have changed, too, with racing – once pretty much the only thing one bet on in a shop – now nowhere near the main attraction in some shops. According to McHugh, a staggering percentage of income in some shops is lotto betting.
“Some shops are turning over €8,000 in a day, which is a respectable amount, and €6,000 of that could be on ‘numbers’. I could be looking at 800 slips in a shop, only 100 slips of them on horses. You’ve roulette, bingo, very low-margin and it’s a lot of dockets for minimal cash but the turnover is there.”
Betting on the outcome of the National Lottery could be banned under plans being proposed by Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath. He wants to ban bookies from offering punters the chance to place bets on Lotto numbers and has written to Minister of State for Law Reform James Browne, asking him to introduce new legislation prohibiting bookmakers taking bets on the outcome of lottery draws.
Research by polling company Red C found lottery betting accounts for eight per cent of all gambling in Ireland – which equates to almost €400m of the gambling industry’s annual revenue. Polling showed 35 per cent of people who gamble on lottery results would play the National Lottery if betting on the outcome were outlawed. Betting on lottery results is banned in the UK, where the government has launched a major crackdown on gambling in recent years.
As of last year, the IBA says there have been 50 shop closures and 300 job losses as a result of betting tax increasing from one per cent to two per cent on January 1, 2019. “The tax is chronic; it is critical it is looked at again. We’ll be sending in our budget submission in the coming weeks. It wasn’t viable pre-Covid, not to mind now,” Byrne added.
Can you get the staff?
Those of us who have enjoyed a beer, meal or even gig this summer will attest to a drop in standards of service. Publicans and restaurateurs have complained that staff are hard to come by and this is no different in the bookmaking industry.
Jenna Boyle’s father John set up BoyleSports in the late 80s. He was replaced by son-in-law Conor Gray as CEO in 2017, with Gray making way for Mark Kemp this year.
Boyles’ retail expansion has been an anomalous outlier whilst rivals have been focusing more online. According to Jenna Boyle, they are not done with expanding. BoyleSports acquired 18-shop Irish bookmaking chain Bruce Betting in November 2019.
“Staff has been a big thing,” she says. “We were closed for the best part of five months. Obviously, you can’t recruit during that time. We reopened and had over 250 new people joined us in retail.
“You can imagine: a big level of recruitment. It is tricky, as there are staff that regularly have to isolate for whatever reason. Retail is fairly full-on when it comes to staff. We have 355 shops.”
With the Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment deterring some from taking up low-paid jobs, it is no surprise to McHugh that staffing is a major issue for Ladbrokes, though he reckons there is more to it than that.
“It was always a bit of an issue but it’s been a huge one since Covid. Obviously, the PUP is a reason but I think if you are hiring young people, they need to have an idea that there is progression down the road. That was something that was always big for me. They are probably looking at retail and wondering where the progress is. I believe good staff members will motivate others.”
Cash is King
The progression, such as it is, away from using cash during the pandemic has been problematic for betting shops. Bookmakers culled credit cards from their depositing methods, though this extension to Revolut has been far from ideal given millennials’ dependency on it.
Whereas there are many who visit betting shops for the very reason that they can make a cash transaction, according to McHugh, nobody under 25 has cash anymore.
“It is the first time I have seen cash being diminished. The younger generation does not deal in cash. You might get a young woman coming into the shop backing a tip for a horse or whatever and you nearly know straight away you can’t take any money off her. That generation is definitely in the process of being cashless,” he said.
On the other hand, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and BoyleSports all benefit from people depositing into their betting accounts via cash in a shop, so they have no fear of ramifications down the line when looking for a mortgage.
With the housing crisis likely the main political issue going forward for years to come, would-be buyers are petrified of betting appearing on their bank statements, though it is striking that a woman in Dublin recently had the bank renege on mortgage approval on the basis of its reservations about what was a well-paid job in retail bookmaking.
According to Sharon Byrne, there are 803 betting shops in the Republic, the IBA representing 760 of those. “I think post-Covid, all options have to be on the table in terms of what a betting shop looks like. Right now, the average shop is not profitable, trading in the red, with turnover a minimum of 40 per cent down since 2019. Members remain heavily reliant on government support and even the large bookmakers will have many non-profitable shops. Give it 12 months and when the government support dries up, the real picture will emerge.”
In 2019, Coral introduced what it called its “betting shop of the future” in Warren Street, London, with a strikingly modern interior of which Dermot Bannon would be proud. Perhaps the future shop will be a cross between a café and a bookies, though, as one insider wryly noted, such facilities “tend to become glorified homeless shelters”.
Another former shop owner envisages “a self-service shop with nobody working or a shop full of machines and one customer service rep, like Tesco.”
That is rather dystopian in the context of the social value of the bookmaker shop now, which should not be dismissed, particularly for elderly people, who like to come in and enjoy some sport and conversation. This was again notable to McHugh during race week.
“The amount of people that came in and said hello to the staff and were delighted to do so was really heart-warming. I’ve always said it to senior management that we have a social responsibility to these elderly people. They’ve possibly not seen anyone in ten months; they are not to be dealt with as a commodity.”
McHugh added that he was struck during Galway about how Ladbrokes essentially had a special offer on not only every race there but Glorious Goodwood. Shops are desperate to attract and keep custom, with Ladbrokes generally less inclined towards promotions than Paddy Power – but needs must.
Paddy Power was sent a series of questions for this article but, citing the pending release on Tuesday of its half-yearly results, would issue merely a brief statement through a spokesperson, notably referencing an “omnichannel strategy”.
“It’s been a challenging time for retail, with shops remaining closed during the first quarter and opening with a number of restrictions midway through the second quarter of the year,” it said.
“It’s still early days but our retail teams have been phenomenal in adapting and welcoming our customers back. Our retail estate continues to be an important part of our omnichannel strategy for Paddy Power in Ireland, providing safe social experiences and choice for customers across the country.”
The lights are on
To conclude this piece, I spent an hour in BoyleSports of Rathgar as racing began at 1pm Thursday, the two staff on duty probably bewildered by my loitering. In that hour, three other people visited the shop. One, on the basis of a discarded docket, lost €10 on a virtual race before I came in.
The others had long left when the third customer came in, a young man who never went near the counter. Instead, he rested for about five minutes on one of the shop’s many arm chairs, observing some of its 32 TV screens, some showing Boyle Lotto, roulette, virtual dogs, virtual horses and virtual bike racing.
He could have spent some time at one of the shop’s five betting terminals, or observe the coffee station which no longer serves coffee due to pandemic restrictions.
There was nobody left when I made my exit, though the lights were still on.
