Business – Page 28 – Splendid Isolation

So Much To Do, So Little Done

January 24, 2020 Kim du Toit Food & Drink, Marketing / Advertising

Okay, Sir Winston may have had more weighty matters on his mind when he said that, but I know how he felt, after reading this:

Britain’s BEST chippies: Top 15 seafood eateries are revealed in National Fish and Chip Awards 2020

As any fule kno, one of my favorite meals in Britishland is the venerable F&C (proof below).

So when I read articles like the above, all it makes me want to do is hop on a plane across The Pond and embark on a tour of the top 15…

However. The list shortens quite a bit as some of the chippies’ locations are on Kim’s List Of Places Never To Visit (based on the recommendations of Stout Bulldogs like Mr. Free Market, The Englishman and the Sorensons) — places such as Belfast, the whole of Wales and anywhere in County Durham.

Still, this one (in Kent) looks promising:

…especially as Kent is home to one of the best beer brands anywhere:

And if they haven’t got Spitfire, there is an alternative:

Tell me you wouldn’t, if you were me.

DoublePlusUnpossible

January 24, 2020 Kim du Toit Business, Mocking Furriners

Could it be? Could it really be?

Britain’s economy will grow faster than those of other major European countries this year as chief executives regard it as an increasingly attractive place to invest, two studies have found.
Amid growing optimism over Britain’s economic outlook, the International Monetary Fund said that it would outperform the eurozone this year and next.

But… but… but…

Could Paul Krugman have been wrong again?

Denial Of Service

December 18, 2019 Kim du Toit Business, Crime, Freaks & Loonies, Snowflakes

Sure, let’s have some snowflake college-dropout coffee jockeys refuse to serve their company’s overpriced shit beverage — again — and when CoffeeMegaCorp Inc. discovers the transgression, they go all “failure of training” and “re-education / retraining” handwringing, and make some token effort at rapprochement.

Here are a couple of my thoughts on the matter.

Refusing to serve people in uniform — be it police, armed forces or firemen, whatever — is not a “failure of training”. In this case, it is a conscious and complete rejection of one of society’s primary institutions (to protect society’s members from the predations of others, or the apprehension and removal of said predators from society). That such snowflakes have come to consider law enforcement as “The Enemy” and therefore worthy of such shunning is a topic for another time.
As I’ve said before, this bullshit does not happen in isolation. Clearly, the refuseniks feel that they can get away with this behavior — by undergoing lip-service token “retraining” — and at some point, one has to think that CoffeeMegaCorp. is somehow complicit in this disgusting activity, whether by corporate culture, or hiring practices, over-accommodation, or perceived weakness (by its employees).

Here’s what I want to see. Denial of service to police officers by an establishment should result in an immediate response from the police chief that his police force will no longer respond to distress calls or service calls from any or all of the corporation’s branches — in other words, if one employee at a branch of Starbucks does this again, then the police will in essence deny police service to all the Starbucks outlets in their jurisdiction. (The collectivist nature of this reaction should appeal to or at least be understood by those liberal/socialist cocksuckers known as Starbucks executive management, after all.)

And if (as in the above) service is not denied but simply delayed, then the police chief should institute a policy that their response to all distress calls from Starbucks stores will be delayed, not by an equivalent period of time, but one ten times longer — i.e. if a deputy has to wait six minutes for service, then police response to an emergency will take at least an hour to arrive.

And should Starbucks file suit against the police force for this reaction, let them drag this through the court system, at their peril.

If Starbucks employees want to set themselves apart from society’s institutions (for reasons I’m not interested in enumerating), then they should be denied the protection of those institutions, permanently. These assholes — employees and employers both — need to understand the true consequences of their actions.

And finally, if Starbucks management tries to kiss ass, e.g. “We are deeply sorry and reached out to apologize directly to them”, the police chief’s response should be to tell them to fuck off and die — in other words, no apology will suffice.

In Cold War terms, this attitude is called “massive retaliation” — where the response is actually far out of proportion to the initial incident.

And we need a lot more of this, to overcome the spoiled, self-entitlement and virtue-signaling attitude of people who are, in the final analysis, no more than flunkies (despite the high-sounding and pretentious titles created by Starbucks).

Finally, the police chief should reach out to other coffee shops in the area and negotiate a group discount for his deputies and their families at those establishments. If Starbucks doesn’t appreciate his officers’ business, the police officers should go where it is.

Fuck these woke shitbrains, all of them. I’m sick of their bullshit.

Economics Lesson

November 27, 2019 Kim du Toit Business, Eco-Crap

As the “climate change” foolishness grows apace, we find bullshit like this increasing at a similar rate:

Shoppers have been left furious as Sainsbury’s has doubled the cost of its plastic bags to 20p in a move dubbed ‘day light robbery’ and ‘profiting from forgetfulness’.
The supermarket’s bosses have said it is part of a strategy to reduce the stores plastic footprint by ‘encouraging customers to develop a re-use mindset’.
There is an incentive to cut plastic use by more than 50 per cent in five years, with the profits going to good causes, Sainsbury’s claimed.

Of course they will. Actually, what this is really all about is Sainsbury’s doing a little “virtue signaling” (as I believe it’s called nowadays).

It’s been a while since I looked at the numbers, but I believe that plastic supermaket bags carry a F.O.B. price of something less than a penny per bag, so that’s quite a profit margin to pass on to the so-called “good causes”.

I think I use canvas bags about 50% of the time, mostly because I either forget to pack them in the car before going shopping, or I do some impulse (i.e. unplanned) shopping on the way home. When I remember, I keep the canvas bags in the car, but it’s not a big deal in my life, because I reuse all supermarket plastic bags at least once, as bathroom trash bags or similar.

Here’s a word of warning about canvas (or any reusable) bags: you have to wash them frequently (errr involving electricity, hot water and detergents, oh dear) as over time they will become portable petri dishes of bacteria, especially if you carry raw meat or fish home in them.

When I travel in Britishland and Euroland, I carry a little polyester bag (folded, it’s about the same size as a handkerchief) in my coat pocket just so that I don’t get caught without one and have to pay for the bags — and in some Euro stores, they don’t offer any bags at all.

If this pisses you off (and it does me), then your revenge should be to pack your groceries away yourself before paying. It slows down the transaction, and cashiers are measured on a simple “time/#items scanned” efficiency metric. Take your time, for added pleasure.

Both Sides

November 18, 2019 Kim du Toit Business, Music

There’s apparently been some nastiness between Taylor Swift and her erstwhile recording company which has turned even more unpleasant since Swift egged her fans on to torment said record company.

I don’t claim to know all the ins and outs of this issue, but the rule of thumb in any imbroglio of this nature is that the money people (in this case the record company) are always going to try to screw the ideas people (that would be Swift, here); so the default position in all this would be to think, with lots of justification, that once again, the record industry is trying to chisel the artist. (Think of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty not able to perform Proud Mary for years because of the record company bastards and publishing deals.)

That said, however, this is the serial feuder and generally-spiteful Taylor Swift we’re talking about, so I think I’ll reserve judgment, just this once. Millionaires squabbling with millionaires:

Enough Already

October 31, 2019 Kim du Toit Bad News, Business

Oh, happy happy joy joy.

JPMorgan Weighs Shifting Thousands of Jobs Out of New York Area

If the transplantees don’t want to leave their extended families in Noo Yawk, you folks at JPMorgan can just move them a little further down the BoWash corridor — like, say, to Baltimore. Should feel quite at home there, what with a Democrat government and all, and it’s only a short train ride back up the coast.

I think I can safely speak for all of us Texans down here in the DFW Metroplex: we’re full of New Yorkers.

Instead of ~~infesting~~ filling the rest of America with your ~~liberal asshole~~ cosmopolitan employees, why not open up a new office in Los Angeles? Gawd knows, they need an infusion of business in the Golden Shower State, and the transplanted Noo Yawkers will be quite at home with things like sky-high taxes, sky-high real estate prices, onerous licensing fees and feral anti-gun laws. And the climate is better in SoCal than it is here. Also, in Texas we have scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders, scary-looking pickup trucks and sometimes, all of them combined:

Let’s not even talk about assault rifles, which can be bought just like candy, by grade-school kids at any corner-store 7-11:

The pastrami is lousy, and the bagels are made by Sarah Lee. There was a vegan store around here someplace (Austin, maybe?) but it closed because they wouldn’t serve chicken-fried okra. And people here think that “lox” is what y’all put on a truck’s toolbox.

And speaking of that kinda thing: Ted Nugent has a ranch just south of here.

(As an aside, we Texans actually think ol’ Ted’s kinda soft when it comes to guns — I mean, he’s even on the board of the NRA, that bunch of compromising pussies.)