The bit about daughter working in Weatherspoons and not eating there ever...
We have had exactly the same experience as Mitzy ...
A good chef can produce an excellent meal from fresh ingredients for a reasonable price ... why eat a frozen bag of 'mixed grill' slung in boiling water then reheated to order ... no skill and even less taste!

We're talking out of date food stuffs and in one case food being prepared by a kitchen assistant because the chef had not turned up

Yuk!

JDW work in the UK because they have huge buying power there, they dictate the price of what they buy, just like people like Tesco, they know the manufacturing costs of the foods, and they offer a small profit to the manufacturers, as long as they can buy a huge amount. In Spain they would at the start have little buying power, so would struggle to be competitive, especialy as the market is so seasonal, they might well do well in summer, but, along with a lot of other places, struggle in winter. Starbucks is a bit different, they are an INTERNATIONAL company, not national like JDW, so the brand name is better known.

I have some knowledge of Tim Martin, the owner of JD Wetherspoon, and how he started his company. He was a qualified barrister from Belfast and lived at Muswell Hill, and liked a drink. His local lost its licence and he used his legal skills to get it back, and then realised that a loophole in the English licensing laws allowed almost any building to obtain a licence, if, hundreds of years ago, some long closed-public house had had one in the area.

Martin bought all sorts of suitable premises, a recent one was the former Chadwell Heath police station, and turned them into pubs, and it was always location, location location, and the local magistrates courts had no option but to grant him a licence. Had he applied for a music or gaming licence, he would have been turned down, so he didn't, and themed his pubs to work without them, and very successfully too.

He went for volume beer sales and brewers fell over themselves to allow him discounts, thereby allowing him to sell beer, often real ale, at a pound a pint.

If you tried to sell 'real ale', the dark, warm stuff with an acquired taste, in Spain, there would be civil unrest on the streets, though maybe not in Benidorm.

Very interesting - thanks for that post HBG! Wetherspoons do sell a lot of beers other than real ale now though - I've even seen San Miguel on a promotion there, and they have quite a good range of continental beers (Polish, Czech and Belgian beers). They've even got a "wine festival" on at the moment, but I'm afraid I don't have the expertise to judge whether their wines are good or not. Interesting also regarding not applying for music licences - Wetherspoons used to publicise the fact a while back that they didn't have music or tvs in their pubs. This is changing now as some of their pubs now have wide screen tvs, and I know of at least one that shows live football. Also they're expanding into hotel accommodation - if they can crack that market that'll be great, as so many hotel chains in the UK are wildly expensive.