Save the Wild Pug

Even in the heart of Boystown, competition for the rainbow dollar is, as a drag queen might exclaim, fierce. Try, then, taking a gamble on a gay sports bar in Uptown and, five years later, rolling the dice again with a next-door Brit pub for poofters. Only this time around, the welcome mat is being rolled out during the worst economic crisis in nearly eight decades.

That’s the story thus far for Crew Bar and Grill and Wild Pug owners Steven Milford and Brian Wells, who opened Pug in late ’08 despite a drop in sales at Crew. “It’s been a crazy time,” Wells says. “We started seeing things slow up at Crew in November of 2007. We were plugging along and working on opening Wild Pug when the bottom fell out. We never saw the initial opening bounce because we opened in November with bad weather and in a horrible economic climate.” Wells says sales at Crew were off 25 percent from the previous December (although they picked up in March), and while Wild Pug has no previous sales to compare to, they’ve been 20 percent off projections. Those are disheartening numbers when you have one business; they’re downright frightening when you have two.

“Opening a new business has been extremely difficult,” Wells admits. “In hindsight, it would have been great to wait to open, but at some point that ball just got rolling and you can’t stop it.”

Wells says he and Milford plan to remedy the situation by ratcheting up the customer service and keeping the booze cheap while tapping into online promotions via Facebook. They’ve also reduced staff and are looking into other areas where they can cut spending without hurting the product. “We need to gain back that 20 percent in sales that was in our initial projections,” says Wells. “Everyone who comes into Wild Pug says it is a beautiful space, but we [still] encounter so many people who say they have never been in.”

Help a gay pub out: Drink a pint at 4810 N Broadway (773-784-4811, worldsgreatestbar.com).

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Save West Loop shops | Save Links Hall | Save the Sun-Times | Save Max's Hot Dogs | Save the McCormick Freedom Museum | Save this orchestra | Save Women and Children First | Save Flameshovel Records | Save Ashburn Farmer's Market | Save the Wild Pug | Save Green Grocer | Save The Playground | Save ARC Gallery | Save this children’s theater | Back in the black | Let them die | Bring it back