Besides the drinks and food you offer and the big screen TV or other entertainment that is there for your customers, your pub is essentially a bunch of tables and chairs and a place for the service people to work. Of course, you do a lot to make your pub have atmosphere so that it becomes a home away from home for your patrons. But when it comes to priorities of crucial areas of focus when you are laying out your pub, the chairs you provide for your customers has to be in the top ten most important decisions you will make if not the top five.

You know from your visits to pubs that became your inspiration to start your own pub that as you look across the room in a very busy bar, it is the tables and chairs who are the hardest workers in the room. Those chairs have to hold your customers for sometimes hours as they enjoy a long evening of beverages and good times with friends. The chairs in your pub are the unsung heroes of your business. The less they are noticed, the better a job they are doing. Your customers will virtually "wear" those chairs like they had replaced their legs as they laugh and exchange stories and as your service persons bring more drinks and appetizers to each table full of customers.

The two more important traits your pub chairs must have to be successful for you is reliability and mobility. The reliability of your pub chairs must be absolutely beyond question. The ability of those chairs to support your customers under almost continuous use night after night and never fail a customer is the number one priority you should place on the purchase or replacement of your pub chairs and stools when you set up your pub. Not only are chairs called upon to hold up customers of every shape and size and weight, a pub customer is an active customer. He or she moves around a lot and moves the chair as well. In the course of one evening, any one customer may move the chair under him or her dozens of time to get in a better position to talk with someone new, to watch an event in the pub or to belly up to the table for a fresh batch of nachos.

Your pub chairs must go where the customer wants to go and do so many times being scooted while still carrying a customer. But most pub chairs don't have wheels. That means that the joints and the construction of the pub chair must have a strength of construction that is far more rigorous than any other chair of its kind. Not only do you count on those chairs holding up to whatever the customers wants to do on a moment by moment basis, those chairs must do that 5-6 nights a week for hours on end. That is high quality reliability so insist on only the best of construction when you buy your pub chairs.

Second only to reliability in what makes a pub chair indispensable is mobility. We have already discussed how important it is that a customer can move easily in the pub chair and shift its position possibly dozes of times in an evening. But that chair also has to be endlessly adaptable and mobile sot he customer can move it to where he or she wants it to be. It has to be light enough to be picked up and moved if a customer wants to carry it to where the TV is to watch the game. Or it might get pulled across the bar on its feet as a customer grabs it to add it to a table where more chairs are needed.

When you lay out your pub, making it possible for the customers to basically redesign the floor space to suit their needs is critically important. Customers in pubs consider the space to be their own and you want that so they will "come home" to the pub and become regular customers. Good pub chairs make that happen. Make sure you put plenty of thought and resources into getting top notch chairs when you set up your pub. And make sure you give them plenty of tender loving care each week so they can keep taking care of your customers each and every night of the week.