By CHIP CUMMINS Dow Jones Newswires
LONDON -- So far, stocks on this side of the Atlantic haven't inspired much interest in the craze for buying and selling shares online. Chris Maher thinks a pint of beer might help.
Mr. Maher recently opened the Market Bar in the City, as this city's financial district is known. The bar offers beer and spirits at market prices, fluctuating with customer demand and flashed over screens similar to stock-exchange quote boards.
In about a month, Mr. Maher plans to offer futures contracts on beer prices, enabling customers to lock in the day's best deals. "You can buy six beers at a low price," he says, taking delivery of the beer anytime during the evening. Sometime soon, the bar hopes to be selling the futures over the Internet.
Keith Bateman, one of the bar's computer developers, envisages a time when a thirsty office worker can surf the Web from the office, find the best price for Budvar (a popular Czech beer served here) and buy three pints of it. "You can order a beer that will be sitting on the bar top when you walk in," he says.
Regulatory hurdles don't look too high. "I think it sounds like quite an excellent idea," says a spokesman for the Corporation of London, which issues liquor licenses for pubs and bars in the City.
As it stands now, the Market Bar's computer system gauges customer demand for about 11 brands of beer and several different spirits, like scotch and vodka. As demand picks up, prices fall -- a sort of "reverse stock market," Mr. Bateman explains. "You don't want to be paying more and more as you keep drinking."
Three large computer screens chart price trends, daily highs and lows and current market prices. On a recent weekday evening, a pint of Heineken Export was selling for £2.30 ($3.70), down 20 pence from its intraday high of £2.50.
The computer system is designed to be easy to understand, but it has confused a few customers who have tried out the bar after a day of trading on the real stock market.
Celene Berman, the assistant manager, says a group of "young City-boy types" recently kept asking why prices "were going the wrong way around," she says. "As they drank more, they were becoming more confused about it, and so was I."
And unlike the real stock market, the bar never suffers from liquidity squeezes. If a beer isn't selling, the computer system simply lowers the price to help boost sales.
"We can mess about a bit," Mr. Maher says. "We can massage the numbers."
URL for this Article: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB928362247157889366.djm