Monday, 23 November 2015

A purely retail task on The Apprentice, a Welsh village taking a stand and a message to the multinationals

At last there's been a purely retail task on the current series of The Apprentice. It will strike a chord with my readers that are independent retailers themselves.


The task was to operate as a discount retailer by selling and reinvesting the proceeds in the items that have actually sold well. Which is independent retail in a nutshell.



There's the obvious and repeated issue with The Apprentice of many pieces of expenditure being totally ignored when it comes to calculations of profit and loss at the end of the task. I looked at it in a previous blog here - http://mytimeinretail.blogspot.com/2015/10/see-lessons-to-be-learnt-from-this.html

This week the ignored items included-
  • Rent
  • Staffing costs
  • Tax
  • Licence on the stall

I know it's the land of television and normal rules don't apply, but it's just not a level playing field.

Which brings me to my second story this week. It's about a village in Wales that is trying to level the playing field when it comes to competing with Starbucks and Amazon.

The tax structures of local business and multinational business are so different that it allows the biggest companies to move their money across divisions and borders to minimise their tax burden.

I personally think it's time for the government of the day (whichever party they may be) to stand up. The message needs to be-

If you want to do business in this country then you'll have to accept lower profits.

The message is stark but necessary. Reduced profits for these companies mean several things-
  • Higher wages for the lower paid in society
  • Smaller tax credit burden on the government and tax payers
  • Large multinational corporations paying their fair share in tax

I'm sure that everyone would agree that these are positive things that we can all get behind.


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