I think we have all felt it in some way.
It’s just part of modern life.
My local leisure centre has just opened the swimming pool again (Better Leisure, part of the bigger GLL) – they are a charitable social enterprise. Very impressive, but they have local councils as their business partner, and executives with high salaries to be paid. (Not in this case do they have shareholders.)
It still feels like cutting to the bone. At it’s most basic lowest level, it means that the Lifeguards are also the cleaners.. you feel that in this false economy, something’s gotta give! (In practice it has always meant the cleanliness, and hopefully not lives..but in the future who knows..) You should have a clear demarcation between a professional cleaner, and a life guard. How did this occur? It’s looking at the amount of time a lifeguard can legally be on duty, and then thinking, “we’ll they can clean when they are not beside the pool.. it’ll save us money…”
My dentist is the same, they have worked out the timings of everything to such a degree, that there is quite literally NO spare space in any of the dentists schedules!
( {My Dentist} you know who you are, even with those funky brackets round your name!!)
God forbid that something unscheduled might go wrong in your mouth, I have been told my treatment can only start in 5 weeks! (That’s five weeks of eating very carefully, and managing my own pain – so far so good!) Clearly there are private dentists, that cost a great deal, but can see you immediately. So what’s the difference? Money, and only Money, I’d be paying for that dentist’s flexibility.
The {My Dentist} set-up is clearly an economy of scale business. They bought my old dentist in London (The older partners sold out – Kerrrr-ching!) They have bought my new dentists too!
If you use a time and motion study mentality, and a bulk-buying mentality, I have no doubt, that you can make yourself extremely wealthy. We have seen it in the Funeral industry, buying out all the small suppliers, everywhere small locals get swamped by bigger organisations. The only people to lose are YOU and I, unless of course, you are a shareholder or employee, and then unfortunately part of our problem!
Choice on the High Street becomes more and more limited, as the independents can’t compete with the bulk-buyers. Corner shops? What are they? Just a thing of the past…
My wife is subject to this too, she works for a Uni, her department were awarded backpay, as they had been paid unfair weekend rates for years.
I think that the backpay must have amounted to £1m – they have recently been told that even though they are opening new buildings, that there’s NO budget for more staff!
They are stretched to breaking point, and will snap when the new building come into use.. but there’s also a requirement for them to save, you guessed it £1m!!
We see High Street stores closing all over the UK.
Poundstrecher being a great example, clearly they offer products at the smallest margin possible, a tiny shift in currency values has made their business untenable.
Look at RyanAir, a no frills airline. (EasyJet) is the same. One flight goes wrong, one plane out of service, then 1000’s of passengers suffer. Why, because cutting business to the bone means NOT having spare airplanes to take up the slack.
The sum is simple, a spare plane in every capital, or 1000 passengers round the world upset, missing their journeys. Someone, somewhere has actually costed that out, and found that it’s better to destroy your day than have a more responsible policy, it’s financially better for their bosses and shareholders, to hack you off!
I guess they move millions of passengers a day, who quietly grouse about their no frills service, but they are a necessity – what can you do?
What actually is a Bugbear? Apparently it’s a mythical creature that was used to scare children – “the bugbear will get you…” The reality is actually more scary, morality has totally seeped out of business. I used to be proud to be a customer of Lloyds bank, these days I wouldn’t touch them with a barge-pole. somewhere in the Eighties, they stopped seeing me as a client to serve, but rather a patsy to sucker into dodgy deals…
The pursuit of profit is alive and well – shareholders DEMAND profits, companies quake at the idea of presenting bad figures! (If you are Tesco. then they top guys just fix and lie about the figures, to avoid this eventuality!)
But why? The bottom line is as follows. “Top guys” get paid huge salaries, to head these behemoths through the troubled waters. One mistake, then their golden lifestyle is gone! Investors who sniff a problem, pull out their cash, quite literally making the problem they feared come true!
Companies are caught between the rock and the hard place. I feel this opens the door for sharp practice, dodgy dealing and eventually criminal behaviour.
But at it’s MOST basic, it’s YOU and I who foot the bill, see our choices dwindle, and if we are unlucky lose all our savings..
All of modern life is lived “Out There” in the Newtonian World, of physical things.
A new paradigm is emerging where more emphasis is put on our “Internal” wellbeing.
The current medical paradigm treats the body like a machine, and has NO idea that there might be more to it than that. External medicine if you will…
Slowly, through Qigong, Meditation, Homeopathy, Acupuncture and the like, we start to discover abilities to use “Quantum Healing” on different “layers” of ourselves.
(How could homeopathy work, there NO physical substance left in it!?
BECAUSE the water has a QUANTUM MEMORY, like a video recorder, on a vibrational level that Newtonian Physics could NEVER explain!)
Our current Pruning for Profit model follows the same conceit.
It doesn’t allow for the spiritual welfare of any of it’s customers – “who gives a sh*t, as long as I get my money!?”
I remember reading about the Dutch version of District Nurses. They were centrally micromanaged to such a degree, that they lost contact with their patients, leaving people feeling lonely and uncared for.. 7 minutes to give an injection, 8 to change a bandage, never the same nurse to see the same client..
You can imagine being an old and vulnerable person, having a new nurse at your door every day..?
These nurses rebelled, and left the organisation to set up on their own. They set up their own co-operative, with no imperative for profit. They used common sense, and developed their own “humane” booking system to give them and their clients time to talk and bond, whilst taking the stress off their own lives.. They built a knowledge pool, to help train each other AND crucially they were able use their strength to get good deals, bulk-buying!!
I believe they attracted defectors from all over Holland and are now bigger than the original service!
So it’s not all bad news!
Very often when you attend a therapy session, people talk to you about “Giving back” and how good it is for you to “Be of service” for once in your life. If you have had a “City” style life of take and take, then turning the focus often becomes a great healer for people. (Imagine the rich family who gives up their Christmas dinner to work in a soup kitchen… a sticking plaster, but a step in the right direction!)
Being of Service is the KEY, in the past businesses saw themselves a public services, now they see themselves a pirates on the high seas of business.
It’s time for a welcome return to a Quantum way of living, tending to the Interior, rather than grabbing things to “decorate” the Exterior.
We live in hope…
