Wetherspoon's
 |
|
| Public limited company | |
| Traded as | : |
| Industry | Hospitality industry |
| Founded | 1979 |
| Founder | Tim Martin |
| Headquarters | Watford, United Kingdom |
|
Key people
|
Tim Martin (Chairman) John Hutson (CEO) |
| Products | Public houses and hotels |
| Revenue | £1,595.2 million (2016) |
| £109.7 million (2016) | |
| Profit | £51.2 million (2016) |
|
Number of employees
|
37,000 (2017) |
| Website | www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk |
J D Wetherspoon plc, branded as Wetherspoon's, is a pub company in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Founded in 1979 by Tim Martin, the company owns just under 1,000 outlets, including the chain of Lloyds No.1 bars and the chain of Wetherspoon hotels. With its headquarters in Watford, Wetherspoons is known for converting unconventional premises into pubs. The company is listed on the and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Tim Martin opened his first pub in 1979, on Colney Hatch Lane in Muswell Hill, north London. Many of the other early Wetherspoon pubs were also in the western part of Haringey. The name of the business originates from JD, a character in The Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, the name of one of Martin's teachers in New Zealand. Martin said, "I decided to call it Wetherspoon's after a former teacher – not because the teacher in question at my primary school in New Zealand had said I would never make it, as some people think, but because he was too nice a fellow to be running our particular class and he couldn't control it. So I thought: I can't control the pub, he couldn't control the class, so I'll name it after him."
During the 1990s, Wetherspoon began a policy of routinely closing its smaller or less profitable outlets, often—but not always—replacing them with larger premises close by. In 1998, Wetherspoon introduced the oversized pint glass to promote the "full pint". This initiative was withdrawn, supposedly because customers were still asking for top-ups, but arguably because other pub chains did not follow its lead.
In 2015, Wetherspoon was made to pay a total of £24,000 for "direct racial discrimination" to eight individuals who were refused admittance to one of its pubs in north London based on what a judge described as "the stereotypical assumption that Irish travellers and English gypsies cause disorder wherever they go".
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Wikipedia