, Britain
A village shop outside Sheffield in the spring of 1984 kept a book under the counter. Names down one side, amounts down the other, settled on a Friday when the wages came out.
The wages stopped coming out in March 1984 and did not start again until March 1985.
Nothing else about the shop changed. The same families came in, wanting the same things, on the same days. The difference was that at the end of each transaction there was a signature in a book instead of money in the till, and the person deciding whether to allow that stood behind the counter knowing no more than anybody else about how long it would go on.
The colliery was the village's entire wage bill
A shop in a town has a diversified customer base whether it wants one or not. Its customers work for different employers, so a bad year in one trade is absorbed by the others.
A pit village does not work like that. One employer pays nearly everybody, directly or through the firms that serve it, and every business in the village sits downstream of that single payroll. The shop's turnover is not really a function of its prices or its range. It is the colliery's wage bill on its way out through a till.
Take the wage bill out and what is left is not a reduced business. It is the same customers with the same needs and no money, which is a different problem from a downturn. In a normal recession demand falls and you cut your cloth. Here demand did not fall. Only the ability to pay for it did.
The strike was also not uniform across the country. Some coalfields worked through it and others did not, so two shops with identical trading histories had entirely different years depending on which village they stood in. There was no national experience of this for a small shop, only the experience of one village.
Household income did not fall, it stopped
The financial position of a striking miner's household through that year was not a reduced income. It was, for most, no wage at all.
The benefit rules of the time made that worse in a specific way. A man on strike could not claim for himself. His family could claim, and the amount was then reduced by a sum the law assumed the union was paying him, whether or not any such payment reached him. Households lived on that remainder, on savings where there were any, on food parcels and soup kitchens, and on whatever the local shops would let them have.
For the shop that produced a particular pattern. The basket did not simply get smaller, it changed shape, and it changed shape in the way that hurts a small retailer most. The lines a village shop actually makes money on are the additions: confectionery, soft drinks, biscuits, the things bought because somebody fancied them. Those go first and they go completely. What carries on selling is bread, milk, potatoes and tea, and staples are the lines with the least in them. So turnover fell a long way and margin fell with it, which means profit fell by considerably more than turnover did. A busy shop making nothing is not a paradox. It is arithmetic.
Credit is decided one family at a time
Every account of shops in the coalfield that year comes back to the same thing: somebody had to decide how much a family could have.
No policy survives contact with that. A limit per household is a sensible commercial instrument and it is unworkable in a place where you know every family and know exactly what the limit means the week it is reached. The shopkeeper was not administering a credit facility. They were rationing, in public, among neighbours, with no authority for it other than owning the shop.
What made it dangerous rather than merely hard is that the shop extended that credit out of its own pocket. Wholesalers and cash and carries wanted paying on their own terms. So the shop funded the community's shopping out of its working capital, then its overdraft, and usually as a sole trader with unlimited liability, which means the house stood behind it.
The commercial case for giving credit is real and it is not sentiment. Refusing means the customer goes somewhere that will carry them, and they may not come back. A shop that protected its cash perfectly through 1984 could emerge in 1985 with its balance sheet intact and its standing in the village gone, and that standing is the whole reason it exists rather than the cheaper shop four miles away. The case against is equally real. A debt never repaid was not a sale, it was a gift of stock already paid for, and there is a quantity of that which closes the doors, after which nobody in the village has a shop at all.
The book was still there in March 1985
The return to work in March 1985 settled nothing for the shop. It started the second problem.
The men went back on a wage, and the book under the counter was now an asset on paper worth a year of somebody's living. What happened to it came down, again, to what the shopkeeper decided alone. Some was paid off in instalments both sides knew would take years. Some was quietly written off, occasionally the whole book at once. Some was never mentioned again by either party, which is its own form of writing off.
Collection was not straightforward even where there was a will to pay. Wages resumed one household at a time, pits closed in the years that followed and redundancy money arrived in some houses and not others, and a debt collected too firmly in a small place costs more socially than it recovers.
What the year left behind, in the shops that came through, was a business with the same customers, a thinner balance sheet, and a reputation settled permanently across twelve months in which every decision was made in front of the people it affected.
Where this shows up in the game
A Year Without Wages is a historical start at hard difficulty. You take on Attercliffe Stores, a village shop outside Sheffield, as a sole trader in March 1984, and run it for eighteen months. You start with borrowing somebody else agreed to, so the year opens with a debt already against the business and no say from you about why it is there. The objective is to be still trading at the end.
Local demand falls sharply in the first month and stays down for a year. Each month you set a credit limit per household. Extending credit keeps the customer and builds your reputation, and it also turns into bad debt at a rate that climbs the longer the strike runs, so the same decision gets dearer every month you repeat it. None of that bad debt is written off until month thirteen, so you carry it throughout and learn what it was worth only afterwards. The shop closing is the only failure condition.
Survival is what is scored, but it is not the whole result. Reputation at the end is reported in the epilogue, and that is the real outcome, because a shop that lasted eighteen months by refusing credit is not the same shop as the one that did not. The seed is fixed at 600005, so everybody attempting it meets the same village and the same year, and the scores compare properly. It runs under ironman rules: one save, and what happens happens. The start, the objective and the rules are on the A Year Without Wages page.