Why Clubs Are the Last Space Left
Aug 14, 2026
A couple of weeks ago I went to an event in the Southern Highlands, where I've lived for six years now. I got talking to a woman there and worked out she lives two doors up from me! Six years, and I'd never seen her once.
Neither of us are unfriendly people. We're just occupied, in the way most working adults are occupied, and somewhere in the busyness we've all just assumed that community is something that happens to you rather than something you build. It isn't. It has to be constructed deliberately by someone, and increasingly there's nothing left in a lot of towns, particularly regional areas, that's actually built for that job. The footy club’s folded. The town hall committee is down to three people, all over seventy, all tired. What's left, more often than not, is the local club.
I got talking about this with Lucy Waterreus, CEO of Clubs New Zealand, on the podcast this week. Lucy started behind the bar and worked her way through to the boardroom over nearly two decades in clubs, and she said the same thing: the local club is often the last space left where people can actually get together.
What "Last" Actually Means
It doesn't mean best, or most popular, or the venue people would choose first if they had five options. It means everything else has already gone. By the time a town is relying on its club to be the place people gather, a lot of other institutions have already failed to hold that role, and nobody in the club industry particularly asked for the job. It landed on us because we were still open.
That's not a small thing to be responsible for, and I don't think enough operators treat it that way. We measure clubs the way we measure any hospitality venue, on covers, on gaming turnover, on revenue per member, and all of that is fair enough as a business discipline. But none of those numbers capture what happens when the club isn't there anymore for the town that's leaned on it. As we’ve seen time and time again, in a flood or a fire in a lot of regional towns: the club is where everyone ends up. It's usually got the space, the kitchen, and often it sits on the highest ground in town, so emergency services rally there and people sleep there if they have to. Lucy confirmed it's exactly the same story on her side of the Tasman. This is because the building was already the one place everyone trusted, long before anyone needed shelter, which tells you the trust came first and the function followed. If you're running a club, the thing you're actually the custodian of isn't the bar or the gaming floor. It's the trust.
The Table Nobody Puts on a Roster
Lucy also told me about three men who used to walk into her old club every Sunday at 2pm on the dot, not for anything in particular, just to sit down together. I've always called that the club's “table of knowledge”, because every venue that's been open long enough has one. It might be three men on a Sunday, or a group of women who've had the same lunch booking every Thursday for fifteen years. It's rarely the biggest spend in the building, but it is consistent.
The systems we use to judge whether a club is doing well are structurally blind to the thing that's keeping a meaningful number of people walking through the door. A general manager gets assessed on member growth and gaming revenue, not on whether the Sunday regulars are still coming. So it's entirely possible to run a club "successfully" by every metric on the dashboard while still losing the thing that made it matter to the people who needed it most. I've seen it happen. New management comes in, tightens the roster, rotates staff faster to save on wages, and within a year the table of knowledge has drifted off somewhere else, or nowhere at all, and nobody upstairs notices because the numbers still look fine.
What's interesting is that this instinct to notice people doesn't have to be taught from scratch. I know when I’m training with a team, I'll often hear a young staff member ask where a particular regular's got to, someone they'd usually see on a Thursday at five. They might not know his name, but they know exactly which seat he sits in, and they know something's off if he's not in it. That tells me the instinct is there, absorbed from the room itself, long before anyone puts it in a training manual. The failure isn't that staff don't notice. It's that most clubs never build on what staff already notice, so it stays an accident of individual character rather than becoming something the venue can rely on when that particular staff member moves on.
Loneliness Isn't a Generational Problem, It's a Structural One
The line that gets repeated most often in this conversation is that Gen Z is the loneliest generation on record despite being the most digitally connected in human history, and it's a genuinely useful statistic because it forces a distinction most of us are sloppy about, between being in contact with people and actually knowing them. But I think framing it as a Gen Z problem lets everyone else off the hook, and my own street is the evidence against that. It's Gen X and the tail end of the baby boomers doing exactly the same thing I described at the start, telling themselves they'll reconnect with people once work or life settles down, but work and life never settle down, so the reconnecting never happens either.
Even the generation we assume has fully checked out into their phones doesn't seem to want that. There's research doing the rounds on American shopping malls seeing a resurgence, not because teenagers have rediscovered a love of browsing, but because it's somewhere they can physically be with each other. If Gen Alpha, who've never known a world without a smartphone in their pocket, are still voting with their feet for physical space, that should tell every hospitality operator something important. The appetite for in-person connection hasn't gone anywhere. What's disappeared is the infrastructure that used to make it easy, and clubs are one of the few pieces of that infrastructure still standing, mostly by accident of having survived everything else that closed around them.
Proximity Isn't the Same as Connection
So while clubs are naturally good at bringing generations together, and there's real evidence for it, I don't think it's quite that simple. Lucy described some of the smaller clubs in New Zealand recruiting staff as young as fourteen, through school partnership programs with parents involved and a courtesy bus to get them home, and putting them alongside colleagues in their seventies. Four generations rostered on together, sometimes five once you count the Alphas working the bistro out the back.
But I don't think the generations mixing on a roster automatically produces the myth-breaking, wall-dissolving connection we like to claim it does. Proximity is the precondition, not the outcome. A fourteen year old and a seventy year old working the same shift can just as easily talk past each other for years if nobody's actively building the culture that makes real conversation likely rather than incidental. What actually breaks the myths each generation holds about the other isn't the roster, it's the moments a manager deliberately creates, pairing people across the generational gap on a task, telling the story of why the club runs the way it does, giving the fourteen year old a reason to ask the seventy year old a real question instead of just clocking in beside them. Clubs have the raw material for this in a way almost no other industry does. Most don't do anything deliberate with it, and the difference between the clubs that do and the ones that don't is entirely a leadership decision.
Building the Table Deliberately
Clubs New Zealand runs something called Club Connect, taking mental health and wellbeing workshops directly into clubs around the country, particularly in rural areas where the stigma sits hardest with older members and where clinical support can be hours away. What I find genuinely smart about it isn't the workshops themselves, it's the delivery mechanism. Nobody has to seek anything out, book an appointment, or admit to a problem before they'll walk through that door. They're already there for the Thursday raffle. The program simply meets them in the room they were already going to be in.
It’s an initiative built on purpose instead of left to whichever staff member happens to notice, and a useful model for anyone running a venue, because it suggests the next step past simply hoping your staff have good instincts. If a club already knows how to notice who's missing from the room, there's no reason that noticing has to stop at a raffle ticket. It can be the front door to something that actually helps someone.
What This Means for the People Running These Rooms
I don't think loneliness gets fixed by a campaign, and I don't think it gets fixed by an app either, no matter how well designed. It gets fixed, if it gets fixed at all, by a room somebody can walk into on a Thursday without an invitation, a staff member who knows their name, and a manager who has been deliberately trained to see the table of regulars as part of the job rather than a pleasant accident. That's the actual argument underneath everything I've said here. The skill of noticing and building on that noticing is trainable, and if it isn't trained, it erodes every time good staff move on, which is often.
It's the exact thing I try to build into middle managers through the Middle Management Movement, alongside the Executive Leaders Movement and our Leadership Coaching programs, because the managers on the floor are the ones who decide, shift by shift, whether the table of knowledge gets protected or lost. All three programs are at michellepascoe.com/traininganddevelopmentprograms if you want to have a look.
There's also plenty more in the full conversation with Lucy Waterreus, including how New Zealand clubs are handling succession and governance as a wave of long-serving CEOs retire over the next five years. It's on The Michelle Pascoe Hospitality Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, or at the link below.
