Britain
The slump to the 2020s, from the point of view of a firm trading through it. The years the games are set in, and what each one did to a small business.
The slump to the 2020s, from the point of view of a firm trading through it. The years the games are set in, and what each one did to a small business.
- Two ships at sea and nowhere to land. Two ships at sea, every port closing, and a year of customers' deposits legally repayable inside a fortnight. What March 2020 did to a cruise operator.
- Twenty-nine suppliers in eight months. The bank balance looked healthy because it was full of other people's money. Why twenty-nine energy suppliers failed between August 2021 and the spring after.
- The April the payroll bill jumped. A care home where nothing changed except the payroll. Roughly £2,500 a head more for exactly the same shifts, against a council rate set the previous winter.
- What every British recession does to small firms. Three recessions, three different causes, one repeated pattern. Which trades go first, which come back fastest, and who quietly got bigger while it happened.
- Playing through a century of British economy. Decimalisation, the three-day week, Big Bang, Black Wednesday, 2008. Nearly a century of British economy, described from the point of view of somebody trying to pay their suppliers.
- Starting in 1971, the year the money changed. Every price in the shop had to be rewritten, and the smallest ones could not be converted exactly. That argument at the counter lasted a decade.
- The three day week, and trading on two of them. From 1 January 1974 a firm got electricity on three consecutive days a week. You could not work harder round that, which is what made it different.
- Big Bang, and the decade that followed it. A printer in Croydon was offered a £40,000 overdraft he had not asked for. That, not the trading floor, is what deregulation looked like from outside London.
- Black Wednesday, and rates at fifteen per cent. Base rate went to 12% before lunch and 15% was announced in the afternoon. A joinery firm in Reading had done nothing wrong and paid for all of it.
- 2008, when the lending stopped. The print firm had customers, orders and thirty years of trading. What it did not have, from November 2008, was an overdraft.
- The year everything shut. The pub took £2,900 on the Friday and nothing at all for the next eleven weeks. What arrived instead was a grant based on its rateable value.
- Fifty towns, and why those fifty. The same unit, the same trade, the same year. In one town the rent is £9,000 and in another it is £31,000, and that is before anybody has sold anything.