In 2020, leaving your coat at a nightclub cost roughly £2. By 2026, the same service — now frequently outsourced to a Dutch locker company, a kebab shop, or a Premier Inn — costs between £9 and £15. That price inflation didn't happen in a vacuum. It sits at the intersection of a genuine security mandate, post-Covid staffing shortfalls, and a venue industry desperately seeking new revenue lines as alcohol sales decline. The legal scaffolding matters here. Martyn's Law — named for Martyn Hett, who died in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing — requires public venues to implement proportionate protective measures against terror threats. For many operators, the simplest compliant interpretation was to ban bags over A4 size entirely. That ban didn't create bag-free audiences; it created a mandatory detour to external storage. The 18-site Academy Music Group network adopted this policy nationwide. The cost of compliance was transferred directly to the ticket-holder. Into that gap stepped eLockers, a Dutch company now operating across Drumsheds, Fold, Warehouse Project, and others. Its commercial model is structurally elegant for venues: no upfront cost, revenue-share on every transaction. The venue takes money without taking risk. The consumer pays for infrastructure the venue doesn't own. At Co-op Live in Manchester, that means £15 for a large bag. At Fold, £9 — and you pay again each time you retrieve something. The Night Time Industries Association puts average per-head spend on a night out at £28.06 in 2026, up from £20.95 in 2020 — a 34% increase. Cloakroom inflation is one engine of that shift. NTIA chief executive Michael Kill acknowledges the bind plainly: operating costs have risen relentlessly across energy, employment, taxation, and supply chains, and venues have passed some of those costs on. But Kill's own framing signals the ceiling: "the consumer cannot be the industry's financial shock absorber indefinitely." That ceiling is now visible in behaviour. Concertgoers are hiding bags behind vending machines, leaving them outside venues entirely, or having them stolen. The unintended consequences are not trivial. A concealed rucksack stuffed behind a carpark machine — as soul singer Danny Toeman did at a Wembley Arena event — is precisely the kind of unmonitored bag the security policy was designed to prevent. The policy that created mandatory bag storage is now generating the security risk it was meant to eliminate. One Reddit user reported leaving their bag outside the O2 Academy in Southampton and finding it stolen. The extraction model has a negative externality that loops back to the original public-safety rationale. Not every venue has followed this playbook. Hackney Bath House charges nothing. Sneaky Pete's in Edinburgh has held at £2 since 2012. The Carpet Shop in Peckham charges £3, with its general manager noting it costs almost nothing to run a staffed rail. These venues treat the cloakroom as part of the hospitality offer — Cam Prentis describes it as a space where staff and customers decompress, with its own music, its own vibe. That model still exists. It's just not scaling. What scales is the eLockers model: frictionless for the venue, opaque on cost until the door, and structurally shielded from competition because Martyn's Law enforcement means you cannot simply refuse to store your bag and walk in. The consumer has no outside option. That is the definition of a captive market — and captive markets, left unregulated, do what this one has done.
