I'm not going to win any friends with this post. But please bear with me.
The problem with an open ended lockdown is that none of us know where the bottom is. The first lockdown - like many businesses - we paid our staff their full wage and got 80% back from the government.
Then seventy.
Then sixty.
You are doing a fraction of your usual business - about 25% during a lockdown month - but still with many of the overheads. None of this is the fault of your staff.
Back then we could plan. We knew when the money ran out. Knew how close we could fly to the bottom and still have enough cash in the bank to pay our obligations.
If we hit that bottom.
Redundancy. Outstanding holiday pay. Outstanding creditors.
Furlough is a way of not crashing the plane or the economy.
Many people in retail work for minimum wage. Many people in hospitality and the arts work for minimum wage. And we did it, for the first six months.
But now we are in the second six months. People are saying social distancing is going to be with us a year. That things 'might' get back to normal by 2022. All the can kicking from October to January, from January to April is not about how far you can kick it from April. Lockdown might be eased by then - non essential stores like Waterstones MIGHT be allowed to reopen.
When we were open, we did around 60% of a usual year. That still makes us unprofitable. Tesco's profit margin is 1% . Nobody has 40%.
There are things you do, accords you make, knowing that a thing will last a month. To protect jobs. To protect salaries. The argument for the furlough level is staff are not working - they don't need to spend money on travel or Starbucks. But instead they get to sit at home watching people who can work from home brag about how much more disposable income they now have.
Three months.
You could burn that money for three months. But each time you burn it you have less. We are flying through heavy cloud cover, knowing what the bottom will look like, knowing what crashing into it will feel like, but unable to see it.
Until it is too late.
Retail needs a date for reopening. Certainty is a thing you can plan for, work towards, mitigate against. Furlough should always have been at minimum wage, but it wasn't. And when that safety net is pulled we all crash.
That's the reality
