I fell on the ice yesterday so comically that if it had been in a movie it would have broken immersion for being too over-the-top. My hat came off and everything. Turns out my right elbow is not doing the thing elbows are supposed to do, so I doubt I'll be able to get the shop open tomorrow like I intended. Should be fine for Tuesday though. The hatch will most likely be closed because there is no heating in the bun shack, but I will be in there selling both buns and a random assortment of my personal and professinal possessions, of which I must divest myself before I am deported. Think of it like a garage sale, if you guys have those in the UK. Or like a charity shop that happens to also sell tobandjan and sambal oelek. Just look for the sign, and follow the smell of succulent pork belly.

Depending on the day we can hang about after hours and drink wine if you want. I find that makes the holidays feel more festive.

 

Don't let the collapse of the UK economy prevent you from seeing this film, which is in every way phenomenal.

I'm curious

 If someone could help me out here that would be great. 

The entire UK is currently experiencing a "Cost Of Living Crisis" yes? 

Primarily, this is due to the massively increased cost of gas/electricity, industries that are required for living in 2022 (can we say 2023 yet? It's like ... two weeks away). A person cannot live without gas and/or electricity. It is illegal to use open flame inside a residential property, which is the only way one could cook or heat their home without those utilities. Even if one could sit in the dark without refrigerated food in the summer, or use the frigid air inside their home in the winter to keep their food cold, wrapped in rags and blankets against the frost, it would be impossible to cook anything without heat. And that's before we get to the part where we live in Scotland, so there is only seven hours of daylight in January. So there you would be, in the dark, starving.

And these utilities are not, as one would expect, public utilities controlled by the government, despite their necessity for living. And there can be no possible way that having your citizens being alive is not a priority for any civilised government. Even if only for selfish reasons. After all, dead people can't pay taxes.

So we are currently witnessing something that is affecting literally every living resident of the entire union, from the poorest to the richest, negatively. And there is the actual risk of death to the most vulnerable. That is not hyperbole. The desperately poor and the elderly and the infirm will die this winter when their power is cut, or they will die from health complications related to cold and malnutrition and overwork trying to solve this insoluble problem. Or they will lose their homes due to spiralling debt and be left in the streets to freeze. 

Countries with nationalised utilities have seen increases as low as 5%. The UK keeps using its little guerilla math to make our jumps seem smaller (12%, then 54% in April, then 80% in October, but they don't mention that that's compounded, so if you were paying £100 it would be £112  but then 54% on that, not on the original £100, so £175 in April, then 80% on that, so £315 by October, etc, so the real increase is actually 215% or more, as I'm sure your electric bill will reflect).

And the argument as to why this should be allowed to occur is that the utility companies are privatised, and the government cannot interfere with the operations of private companies. The companies have no moral obligation to the citizens and the government has no control over how these companies choose to operate their business. It would be a violation of their rights as capitalist entities, which apparently outweigh the rights of actual living human beings to see inside their own homes or not freeze to death.

And yet, if I recall correctly, for a period of twenty four months between April 2020 and March 2022 the UK government absolutely and unilaterally told almost every private business in the UK exactly what they were allowed to do and how, at great detriment to their profits, their workflow, their livelihoods, and their sovereign rights to pursue capital, did they not?

I myself, owner of two small restaurants, was told I had to close completely, and then that I could only do takeaway despite being set up to do sit-in dining, and then how many people were allowed inside my space, what kind of perspex and sanitiser I had to have on hand, how many employees could work there at any given time, etc. I had to provide masks and gloves, refuse service to non-compliant customers, close at random intervals for indeterminate periods of time while wages were still due and stock spoiled, and watch while my very hard-earned savings dwindled away to nothing. A shifting, impossible to navigate series of hoops and demands, the violation of which would result in my shops being closed by the government and being fined for violating the rules. 

I'm not sure if any of you remember, but the whole fucking city of Glasgow was shut except for grocery stores and petrol stations for quite a while there. Airlines were not allowed to operate. The taxi industry basically collapsed. Grants and furlough were not remotely enough to save hundreds and thousands of businesses across the UK who could not survive closure nor operating at half-capacity. Last time I checked that was the government telling private businesses what they could or could not do because there was a risk to the safety and health of the citizenry.

So I'm just wondering how it is that suddenly the government, when faced with a similar but even more acute crisis, which unlike COVID will actually affect 100% of the population, and also carries the risk of death for the most vulnerable among us, is suddenly unable to issue a single command to the utility companies or tell them specifically what they can or cannot do.

Either you can or you can't. And since we all know that you absolutely can, why would you not do it right now, before the holidays, at the coldest, shittiest time of the year, for the good of the people you are supposed to represent?

Every single one of these companies is on track to make record profits this year. RECORD profits. I know I bring this up all the time but Shell alone will make more in profit in 2022 than the entire £37 billion bailout package for ALL of the entire UK's poorest families. And that's just Shell. And that £37 billion is doing absolutely fuck all when these companies just quadruple their rates to overcompensate unnecessarily. So again, why could the UK government tell every restaurant, nightclub, retail outlet, office, airline, etc how to run their business even if it crippled them, but can't do the same for the ones that are right now causing absolute chaos and misery across every sector of the population?

I'm sorry, I keep saying "can't" when I'm asking why they won't. The precedent has already been well set. Two years worth of precedent, and we are technically still in the second year for another two weeks so it's not like you need to dig up some historians from their dusty libraries to explain how it worked back in the Victorian era. It was THIS YEAR. So what's the issue? 

Why won't they stop them, and why are they still in charge? Blatantly ignoring the basic needs and the lives of their constituents to help their pals make some money at the people's expense should immediately eliminate any mandate they think they have.

So if someone could explain it to me that would be great, because I just can't seem to make it make sense.

Say you made one million pounds in 2021

You did this by selling SEX VIBRATORS to LONELY WOMEN at the LANARKSHIRE COUNTY RUBBER WIGGLER CONVENTION.

It was a great year for rubber wigglers, and butt lube sales were also through the roof. Just a fantastic time for the whole industry. 

Thankfully, your vibrator manufacturing infrastructure has been in place for many years, and you stay on top of advancements in materials and design, plus there are government subsidies for large-scale wiggler production. Profit is steady and secure.

But oh no! War has broken out on the continent! There is a MAJOR DISRUPTION in the VIBRATOR SUPPLY CHAIN! 

You are counting on that million pounds in 2022! You already have your flights booked to the WARM GEL CONVENTION in Athens, and you need to pay your DIRTY UNDERWEAR BILL! Whatever will you do?!

Well, let’s see: Let’s say it costs you £10 to make a really top-notch, super long, very ergonomic vibrator that really wiggles those hard to reach places. First you need the raw materials (RUBBER, and AN ELECTRIC WIGGLER), which are sent to your SEX FACTORY to be assembled and hand painted by the art department. That’s all there is to it. The rubber costs £2.5 and the small yet powerful wiggler costs £6, plus a minor (yet in your eyes vital) £1.5 for some really vibrant paint.

Your production costs and wages are steady because you have a small yet dedicated team of RUBBER WIGGLER MANUFACTURERS that know their jobs and do them well. Your outgoing expenses are consistent because this isn’t your first SEX RODEO. Therefore, every year since you first had the dream of making aesthetically pleasing sexual prosthetics for the lonely and/or horny you have sold forty to fifty thousand “units” (that’s an industry term, which in this case represents RUBBER WIGGLERS) at a retail price of £40 each. Quite an impressive markup, but you have added VALUE to people’s VAGINAS AND BUTTS, and they are happy to pay it.

Your outgoing expenses, not counting raw materials, are £100,000 per year. That covers wages, utilities, shipping and distribution, dry cleaning, the company dental plan, rent on your vibrator factory, dry ice, wet ice, petrol for the unmarked van you bought when the company car got vandalised, and marketing. So it costs, every year, £100,000 plus raw materials to run the best god damned vibrator manufacturing company in Scotland, if not the whole of the UK.

So how many RUBBER WIGGLERS do you have to sell (at a very reasonable, especially for the WIGGLE QUALITY, £40) to consistently make a million pounds a year in profit?

MATH(S):

£1,000,000 (profit)

£100,000 (outgoings)

£??? (materials) (obviously this depends on WIGGLE DEMAND)

If we assume making £1,600,000 will cover the whole thing with some to spare then that is your target for the year, meaning you would need to sell roughly 40,000 SEX DEVICES to ensure you cover all costs and meet demand, plus make that £1,000,000 you want so you can go to the best LATEX WALTZES and DOUBLE-ENDED BRUNCHES that bring such joy into your life.

40,000 x £10 (rubber/wigglers/paint) = £400,000 (materials)

40,000 x £40 (retail price) = £1.6 million 

£1.6 million - £500,000 (£400K materials + £100K outgoings) = £1.1million in PROFIT

BOOM. There you go. Only a fool could fail to sell 40,000 “units” of top quality RUBBER WIGGLERS in a country this LONELY and HORNY. You do it every year! You’re on easy street!

But wait! We were so caught up in SEX MATH we forgot about the ECONOMIC CRISIS! 

The cost of rubber has LITERALLY DOUBLED! And there is an ELECTRIC WIGGLER SHORTAGE affecting almost all of the European Union! Thank fuck you use good old fashioned UK VIBRATOR PAINT, made right down in Yeovil. Still, this is a disaster for your rubber wiggler company. It now costs £5 in rubber, and £9 for the wigglers, plus inflation has pushed the cost of even UK-made vibrator paint to £2 per unit. 

SUDDENLY THE  DEPENDABLE RUBBER WIGGLER MANUFACTURING COSTS HAVE SPIRALLED TO AN UNPRECEDENTED £16 PER RUBBER WIGGLER! JUST TO MANUFACTURE! JUMPING JESUS ON A POGO STICK, WHO HAS HEARD OF SUCH A THING? AND WHAT DOES THIS DO TO YOUR BUDGET?!?

Well, your outgoings remain the same. The factory is good, the employees are seasoned pros, and you can even save a little on dry ice this year because of some internal feedback about its overuse. So that’s still £100,000 in outgoings. 

And, even though people are hurting and worried about the GLOBAL SITUATION, you still need that £1,000,000 in profit to go LUBE DIVING in Peru and you have to fly to Paris for the JIZZ MOP TRADE SHOW in August because there have been some really interesting developments in that industry and you don’t want to be out of the loop.

So now your materials costs to make 40,000 rubber wigglers is at £640,000 instead of £400,000. And, of course, at current prices you would instead need to sell another 4000 wigglers just to hit your targets, which would increase materials cost closer to £700,000. That’s a 75% increase!

Fucking-A, WIGGLE BOSS. Can you guarantee that there are another 4,000 horny customers out there? And how do you cope with the near doubling of your materials costs?!

I know it sounds crazy, but you could do one of several things:

1. Keep prices and distribution steady in a time of uncertainty, absorbing the added cost of production so that LONELY HORNY PEOPLE all over the country have something dependable and wiggly to cling to and/or sit on. This would mean you only make about £750,000 in 2022 and you would very likely have to skip the NOVELTY BUTTPLUG CONVENTION in Sacramento, including their absolutely legendary taco bar.
2. You could increase the cost of your product to £45, a 12.5% jump for the customer, and hope that sales remain steady despite the economic uncertainty prevalent in the world at the moment. Then you would make £1.8 million, which covers your materials increase and outgoings, and still leaves you your cool million in profit.
3. You could sell your rubber wigglers for £100 instead, citing the economic disruption and increased costs but inflating those costs to people who are bad at math and/or not allowed to see your books, and take advantage of the government subsidies given to the WIGGLER INDUSTRY to offset their costs, which would actually make 2022 the most profitable year for your company by a HUGE MARGIN even if you only sold 20,000 “units” but would set you up with so much cash you could retire at the end of the year if sales remained at current levels. 

You would make £4,000,000 just in 2022 alone, and less than a quarter of that is needed to run the company. It is not in any danger of failing or even incurring a single penny of debt. Its costs would be covered after you sold your first 1100 wigglers. 

In a regular year, with regular costs, and rubber wigglers selling for their previously totally acceptable £40/each, you would only have had to sell 4000 of them to break even. The other 36,000 were pure profit. 

Remember, almost all of this SEX MATH is dealing exclusively with a vibrator company that wants to make A MILLION POUNDS A YEAR IN PROFIT. At absolutely no point is it in danger not doing so. You could have been selling vibrators at £20/each this whole time and still made £300K a year. 

You could quadruple the cost of rubber and electric wigglers and it would still not be necessary to charge the consumer the original £40 for you to have a profitable company. Sure, it’s not going to make you a millionaire, but you won’t starve either, and your company is not in danger of closure.

(£10 rubber, £24 electric wiggle unit, £2 paint = £36 per wiggler to produce)

(£36 x  40,000 units = £1,440,000)

(£100,000 outgoings + £1,440,000 materials = $1.54 million operating costs)

(£40 retail wiggler price x 40,000 = £1.6 million, or £60,000 profit)

In what universe would it be necessary to quadruple the cost to the consumer? When would you ever need to charge someone $160 for a vibrator that only costs £10 to make? £20? Even £40?

When they have no choice, of course. When they have to use a long, ergonomic rubber wiggler or their children will starve or they will freeze to death. When they cannot eat or work or in any way exist in the modern world without your big, sleek, wiggly necessity.

Remember when Roosevelt said “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster” in response to WWII? Remember when we actually tried to discourage war profiteering and disaster capitalism? Of course you don’t, because that world is gone, and the one we live in is a joke.

I hate math(s), but I hope this little diatribe can help you make some sense of your current electricity situation, and the much worse one coming next month, and the absolutely bonkers one coming in March. I don’t need to make sense of it. I can spot a shower of cunts from a mile off (or 1.5km if that is easier to process), and that’s all I can spot these days, everywhere I look. You can’t throw a rock without nicking an absolute bastard running 100% on premium unleaded high-octane greed, from the politicians to the corporate fuckbags they work for to the wannabe coffee barons and bar owners on the local strip. It’s trickle-down corruption, and you’re the recipients of every level of shit dripping from above you.

I was trying to be an example of how to succeed from the opposite direction, but I didn’t count on the public utility sector being privatised, so … I failed. Got five good years out of it, though.

Thank fuck all those social media influencers tried so hard to shut me down last year, eh? It did actually take a pretty good chunk out of Nanika’s sales. That was a good use of everyone’s time, and did a lot of good for the world. Let them be your guiding light, paragons of honesty, virtue, and integrity that they are. The old fucks in charge are rotten to the core and have set up the system to retain their power and profits and the youth can be bribed to destroy their own future for a free cheeseburger or a pair of shoes.

Ah well, at least we’ll all still have Locavore to keep the “community” going this terrible winter. Who among us is not comforted by the thought of a £12 turnip? I know I am.

Stay LONELY, Glasgow, and stay HORNY. 

Somewhere out there is the last honest LUBE MIXER working his ass off to bring you what you really want for Christmas.

"Welp," sighed the former whelp, "That's that."

"Good morning,

I spoke with your office yesterday regarding having received a notice of disconnection from BES Utilities for my business at 72 Victoria Road. I have been there since August 2018, so nearly five years, and it has always been my mission to provide the best food I can to the people of this neighbourhood for under £10. We were in The List's top restaurants in Glasgow in the last eating and drinking guide pre-pandemic, which I thought was incredible since we were up against some of the most expensive and large venues in the city, and Nanika only seats 14 people and a dinner for two will come in under £30 even if you really gorge yourselves.

It has been closed for the past six months due to an injury (I had tendonitis and could not use my left arm, so I operated a different business at my other shop on Allison Street while I was doing physio), so the only electricity usage would be the refrigerators and dehumidifier that are always running, and the occasional prep day and dishwashing where there would be very minimal drain compared to actual service, when the extractor fan/pasta boiler/steamer/bain marie/rice cookers, etc would need to run concurrently for at least five hours per night.

If you are familiar with the shop you will know it is literally one small room with one lightbulb, maybe 50 square feet. It is, I believe, the smallest functioning restaurant/takeaway in Govanhill. And I would like to reiterate that it has been closed, and thus its electricity usage has been as low as possible from the 20th of April to the 10th of November, when we reopened. We were similarly closed last year from May to September while I set up the other shop, with all the same equipment running at Nanika, and our monthly electric bill was £225 on average. That is the baseline for a closed shop, with £350 being average for the times we are operating normally.

I have had a direct debit set up for the electric bill since 2020, and I do not normally pay attention to the total, as it has always been consistent. In October, however, for the period of 15th September to 15th October, I received an invoice for just under £900, which is more than double the previous month's invoice. It is also almost double the monthly rent.

As I did not have £900 in the account, I immediately cancelled the direct debit and tried to contact BES, but their web interface was not functioning, and after managing to speak to an agent via chat he informed me that he couldn't even authorise anyone to call me back. All he would do is insist that I reinstate the direct debit. I explained that there is no way a closed shop could possibly use £900 in electricity, and that I wanted an engineer or other professional to come out and check the supply to determine what could be drawing that much energy or if someone else had somehow accessed my wiring. Eventually he agreed to have someone call me. I received two calls in November from BES, both of which were dropped due to poor connection on their end, as I spoke to them on the restaurant's phone, which we use every day we are open to take orders. There is no signal loss inside the building and the phone is on wifi anyway. When I attempted to call back the number was outgoing only and would not re-connect me to BES. (As an aside, I am wondering why so many companies nowadays use dead emails and blocked numbers to communicate with their legitimate customers; why is it legal to contact people about their accounts from a means of communication that can't be used to return the contact? And why would you want that?)

I then received a second bill for 15th October to 15th November for another £900 without explanation nor resolution, along with an intent to disconnect notice. When speaking to the disconnection agent he told me that if I did not give them £1100 in 24 hours they would remotely cut the power, and that if I didn't have £1100 then it would show that my business wasn't "economically viable" enough to continue operation.

As you can imagine, someone quadrupling one of your monthly bills after five years of consistent operation and then calling the business economically unviable when that is the sole reason that it would be so is as insulting as it is laughable.

Either someone is illegally using electricity from my meter (it is a shared building), or BES has literally quadrupled my energy costs in under six months, which would be completely unsustainable for ANY business, let alone one as small as Nanika.

I have attached several monthly bills and invoice summaries, etc. for your examination, as well as a small flyer I put on my window in September, before I received the first startling invoice. As you can imagine, Brexit and the post-COVID economy have driven my cost of goods up significantly. Literally every item I need to buy in order to make food for my customers has increased in cost in the past 12 months. I have raised my prices by 50p from their 2020 levels, and my profits are significantly decreased. Some months I even lose money, but it has always been more important to me that normal people can afford a good dinner in this neighbourhood and that they can count on the restaurant being there for that purpose.

A main at Nanika is £9. A bun is £4. A person making minimum wage can get dinner for the cost of an hour's work. Apparently I should be charging £13 for the thing you can hold in your hand and £34 for a chicken katsu, if we're going by the BES maths, which would be wildly out of the reach of my neighbours, friends, and fellow Govanhill residents.

If these figures from BES are accurate then Nanaika must close immediately. It cannot absorb the cost of their naked greed. Obviously the energy consumption would increase with regular weekly operation, and if it miraculously costs almost a thousand pounds just for the shop to sit empty what would it cost to actually sell food?

There is no possible way that BES could need to increase costs by 400% to cover their expenses unless they are simply willing to let people literally die to maintain or exceed their already astronomical profit margins, which would be repugnant from a restaurant but should be literally illegal from a utility company. The difference between Nanika and a utility company is that nobody needs Nanika to keep their house warm in the winter, or to keep medical equipment running for the sick and dying. They don't need buns to see when the sun sets at 3:30pm, and to keep their groceries from spoiling.

I hope to hell there has been a mistake, or that some illegal activity is to blame rather than just corporate greed and government complicity pairing to literally kill off some citizens for money this year, because while I have been here for ten years and tried my best to improve the city/country I cannot and will not contribute to that sort of behaviour. It is morally bankrupt and disgusting, and can have no positive consequences for the UK and its actual people going forward.

Please review the attached, and let me know your thoughts.

Thank you,

Justin Valmassoi"

Just in case you were wondering why we're closed this weekend and every weekend thereafter, that is the letter I sent to my MP this morning, but I already know the answer. There is no cap on commercial electricity, so the energy company doubled my bill in April and then doubled THAT in October, and will continue to do so while making record profits, just like every other privately-owned utility company in the UK because nobody will stop them. I work 70 hours a week. I have been doing that for years. I will not do it so that BES can make more per week than I do while thousands of their customers will literally die this winter in shivering poverty. Fuck them and fuck those that created the situation, and continue to allow it to progress. And fuck the "small businesses" that lie about their energy woes, and the "community interest companies" whose entire business model is apparently based on borrowing money from the taxpayer, and somehow still charge triple what any other business charges for the same items. I will not be holding a crowdfunder so the community can pay twice. Without Nanika I will not be able to afford my visa renewal either, so what I really need is someone to take my pet when they deport me, as airlines do not allow lizards to fly on them. Believe me, I have checked.

This country is broken. I came here because mine was too, and I thought the people here were smarter, but it turns out they were just on a slower path to the same point.

I have not always enjoyed my job, but I have always enjoyed my customers, and seeing/feeding you week after week, year after year. You are the best, and I wish you all a tolerable Christmas and independence from Westminster's insane policies in the future.



Thanks, Govanhill. Happy holidays, etc.