Specialist industries
Concessions, licences and price controls. The trades where a regulator sets what you may charge, a term of years decides how long you have it for, and one…
Concessions, licences and price controls. The trades where a regulator sets what you may charge, a term of years decides how long you have it for, and one published number decides whether you keep it.
- Miss twelve bins and it is in the paper. Seven years, one customer, a price you cannot change, and a published count of the collections you missed. Nothing in this trade is won by selling.
- Open all night, by order. The fuel earns pennies, the toilets earn nothing and the night shift loses money by order. The food, the lodge and the chargers pay for all of it.
- Twenty-five days a year. A stadium earns on about twenty-five days and pays out on the other three hundred and forty. The capacity it may sell is a number the council writes, and can reduce.
- The winter is when the work is. Nine weeks carry the whole year and none of them can be repeated. What a theme park does in January decides whether Easter happens at all.
- Fixtures you are given. A racecourse does not choose its dates, its runners or the weather. The money comes from the race being televised, and prize money is what buys the horses to fill it.
- Selling theatre time to surgeons who do not work for you. The surgeons are not employees. They are granted privileges, they fill your theatres, and they can take their lists and their patients somewhere else next month.
- Buy trains, then wait for a tenant. A leasing company owns trains and never runs one. The whole return sits in what happens when a lease ends and the next operator does not want the fleet.