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How City W***ers Ruined Your Half-Time Pie
Your favourite chocolate bar is smaller, your football team is laden with debt and your beloved pie now tastes like it's been rinsed in sewage. I blame the city, and it's only going to get worse.
News that the Old Boys had won the bully off went down a treat
I don’t trust people who read the financial section of newspapers. In my mind, they’re all of a certain type. They played hockey at university. They like shit music. They obsessively compare mobile phone tariffs.
I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to talk enthusiastically about index trackers at dinner parties. I don’t want Top Gear to be the cultural highlight of my week. So to protect myself I’ve always followed a strict regime of total financial ignorance.
I’m a financial fuckwit. I’m like Robbie Savage at a performance of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Wide-eyed and gormless. Endowment mortgages, share dividends, personal equity plans: it’s all just a noise.
I’m proud of the fact that I’m entering middle-age without a proper understanding of what the interest rate is. It’s one of the few accomplishments in my life – along with never having watched an episode of The Bill, and not knowing the rules of chess.
But recently I’ve started to cautiously peer out from my bunker and gaze down upon this strange grey world – and, from what I can make out, it’s totally fucking nuts. The whole system of stocks and shares, the free market and all that – it’s insane.
It’s a giant machine which takes good things and makes them shit. You feed something good in – football, the internet, telly – and out comes a foul smelling mulch.
Think of something which was good 10 years ago – brands you liked, products you used, services you could rely on. And compare them with now. How many of them are now shit – have been destroyed in some way? How many things can you no longer buy or have been made obsolete?
It’s not just the curmudgeonly effects of aging; things do get worse over time – because that’s the way we’ve designed our system.
This is how I figure it works.
Say you’ve got a company which makes pies; nice, reasonably priced pies. They sell well and the company gets a good reputation. The bloke who started it – let’s call him Trevor – makes a decent profit. Nothing spectacular but enough to live in a big house with a water feature and a surgically enhanced wife.
He has enough to pay his workers a decent salary. Everyone’s happy: Trevor, his workers and the region’s pie eaters. And if they keep making good pies and selling them at a reasonable price, this could last for generations. It’s a stable and profitable company.
But Trevor wants a bit more. He wants to live in a moated castle and have his own fleet of Harrier Jump Jets. He needs more money to build more factories, to sell more pies. So he floats his company on the stock market.
You could try to sell more pies by making them a bit…sexier. Supersize them. Inject the crust with cheese. Add some vitamins. Make them into diet pies.
His business is chopped up it into a thousand imaginary pieces which are flogged to a thousand chinless people throughout the world. These people have one thing in common – they couldn’t give a fuck about Trevor’s pies. All they care about is the line on their monitor which his company now represents.
Trevor’s stable and profitable company is of fuck all interest to them because it represents a straight line. And a straight line is no good, you can’t make money off a straight line; it’s got to be wiggly. Because that’s the only way their shares will be worth more than when they paid for them.
So Trevor, with the help of his new mates from the city, must find ways of making his business more profitable. Expanding, diversifying, increasing efficiencies – all that malarkey. The problem is that this process lasts….for eternity. It can never stop – no matter how much money he makes. It’s never enough. He still has to make more the following year. Or his line will droop.
But how do you manage to make more and more profit for the rest of time? There are lots of things you can do.
You could try to sell more pies by making them a bit…sexier. Supersize them. Inject the crust with cheese. Add some vitamins. Make them into diet pies. Or if none of that works – you could make them smaller. Use less meat. Use crappy, cheaper ingredients.
Or you could diversify. How about a range of X-Factor themed pies? Or what about marketing – irritating pie ads which pop-up every time you use the internet? Or you could employ an agency of highly intelligent idiots to rebrand your pies. Do we need to call them pies? I’m thinking single mum, middle-income, love handles. I’m thinking CrustyPots.
And if none of this works then fuck it. Pay your workers less. Or make them work longer. Or employ less of them. Or replace them with robots. Or move your factory to an industrial estate in Cambodia.
As the years pass, it’s likely that Trevor will attempt all of these things. It’s part of the barrel-scraping hunt for profits which must continue until the company owns the entire universe, or goes tits up.
And while he’s frantically doing this, his city friends are listening to Razorlight and stifling their sniggers. Because what Trevor doesn’t know is that it doesn’t really matter what he does. Because the direction of his line isn’t that important. They can make as much money from a line going down as one going up. They’re clever like that.
So who benefits from all this? The chinless people are obviously chuffed – they’ve got their wiggly line to play with. Trevor might do okay – he may get his personalised Harrier Jump Jet. But for the rest of us – it’s rubbish.
The workers get treated like dirt; a costly nuisance. And that pie, the nice one which started all this; is gone. Replaced by an ever-changing line-up of “new and improved” crust based packages.
The process is complete. You’ve taken something good and made it shit.
And this system is the bedrock of our society. It’s what we’ve chosen as the best way to organise our world. We have global corporations – large swathes of our population, millions upon millions of people whose lives are devoted to this process of making things a bit worse than they were before.
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COMMENTS
Spot on
I know this is not meant to be taken completely seriously, but you really can't start an article explaining your theory on the fundamental flaws of capitalism with the statement that you are a 'financial fuckwit'. It kind of undermines the rest of what you say. Which incidentally confirms the intro.
and continuing the "not taking it seriously but..." theme, a massive proportion of public share ownership is with fund managers, which means pension funds, investment vehicles like ISAS and a whole host of financial savings products that nearly every single person over 40 in the country has. and all these things are expected to grow because as consumers thats what we want from our financial products. now i'm not protecting bankers, i think they are blood sucking leaching vermin scum who create no value, BUT, at the same time you have to acknowledge the twisted fuckery that is the state of affairs that the inconsiderate shareholder who part owns trevors pies is more than likely to be you. its an amusing article though!
The man has a point. I'm off to top meself. All your fault...
You had me at "Why Everything is Shit Nowadays".
Isn't this just painting by numbers?
The only problem with capitalism is that it welcomes lucky working-class humps like "Trevor" into the ranks, mainly of course because [as suggested in this piece of fiction] he aspires to improve himself and his gutter-snipe spouse, and rise above his grim working-class roots : keeping the City blue-blooded, and open only to those who hunt and who were educated properly at top rank public schools, is the only way ahead, but, sadly, these days is at risk. Incidentally, is one to infer from this story that there are people out there who actually purchase and consume pies made by way of mass manufacturing, rather than produced downstairs by 'Cookie' ? Pip pip !
...financial saving products that nearly every single person over the age of 40 in the country has! Think again.
Love this article. Love, love, love this article!!!!!
I'm pulling the duvet over my head until it all goes away!
wow, original subject, deep original thoughts.
Your comment about the pies was so right! In Philly, Tastykakes used to be made daily, covered in waxed paper, delivered to stores and vending machines every morning, and yesterday's were tossed out or given to soup kitchens. Then they wanted more. People who eat Tastykakes today have NO IDEA how delicious they were. No idea at all. They are just not the same. Sometimes I love capitalism, sometimes it gets on my nerves. But I suppose I'd rather have it than some other system that will eventually go to hell in a handbasket as well.
highly intelligent idiots. I love them , chinless. even better. Good piece of storytelling here..
You can't play chess?
Touched a nerve. Lots of Razorlight fans reading the ST?
Crapitalism
You've missed the major benefits of capitalism - choice, freedom and competition. So if your pie becomes rubbish, people are free to stop buying it. And they are free to start their own pie companies, make nice pies, and make themselves some money. Or go try a pie in a communist country. (Hard to find a communist country these days - funnily enough). Pies might be lovely there, but the shop runs out, you can only buy one pie a week, and the pie factory employs 800 people to do 50 people's work, but still only makes 10 pies a week. Not sure why I am bothering writing this though. Given the author's admitted level of knowledge, his article is a lot like me writing an insulting piece on three-day eventing.
You aren't a 'financial fuckwit', you are a fuckwit. Lazy, poorly conceived, badly executed garbage. I'd like those two minutes of my life back please.
I got lost a bit. So what is Trevor doing now?
sometimes a fuckwits perspective is required to remove the clouds of complexity that in fact have no substance
@Bozoid: Tough. You can't have your minutes back. You creep ever further towards the grave. Why are some of you so defensive? This is a humorous piece, not a Marxist deconstruction of the modern global market. Its almost as though you're clinging on to what you were taught as children because you want so desperately to believe the system is inherently good and that if you just try hard enough then you too can climb the ladder and join the chinless ones, and failing that, at least the meaningless material goods that you bought with the fair wage you earned from your totally-not-pointless job will be of the highest possible quality (not obsolete before release like an iPad). Capitalism is great.
Alot of truth in this, but it assumes that shareholders always demand capital growth. That's not always the case. Many equities are purchased because it's a stable company which regularly turns a healthy profit and doesn't necessarily grow -- the return on investment is from the profit being distributed as dividend to the shareholders. Marks & Spencer's shareholders for example, aren't expecting a hundred new stores a week. They require consistent, stable profit they can snaffle a share of.
@DrRic. and capitalism works by employing 25 people to do the work of 50. Ideally 12 year olds so they can pay £1 per hour.
Great article.A lot of truth in it.
I guess we've all been conditioned to want a bigger share of a bigger pie, and are mildly disconcerted to find out that we're all going to end up living in dustbins and eating leaves. Just not pukka, old bean.
Give me a house to live in, enough money to buy food, booze, clothing and drugs. I'm happy. Many are not. Capitalism can be an arse but I can have a great big line whilst listening to Led Zeppelin in my ipod because of it.
Very eloquent. So why go for a public float? Most companies don't. They do what Trevor always did. Nothing wrong in that.
FTSE 100 chief executives with 49% pay rises, George Osborne giving those with fortunes stashed in offshore tax havens a couple of years' headstart before he counts to one hundred and comes looking for it (whilst at the same time putting the boot into anyone too disabled to outrun government cuts), Blair pocketing millions in "consultancy fees" and breathing a quiet sigh of relief when a certain Libyan colonel takes a bullet to the head - well, like Jarvis Cocker sang, cunts are still running the world. It was ever so. But - allegorical though it may be - you never, ever, under any circumstances, fuck with a man's pie. Fuck with a man's pie, you're liable to find yourself hanging upside down from a lamppost, Mussolini-style, wishing you'd left well enough alone. That shit ain't funny.
I hope Arsene reads this article because the half tine pie I had at the Emirates on Tuesday was really really shit. And Im pretty sure it was the most expensive one Ive ever bought.
Part of everything turning to shit is that even a page like this carries a banner ad for yet another formulaic crap film. Oh, and anyone who does know of a decent pie anywhere please post that info now, for the love of God!
This article speaks the truth. There is no place for this sort of thing in The modern world. Ignore this pie eating puritan. We are all in this together,if chinless city boys make money we shall get crumbs from better quality posh city of london pies, Pies which cost the same as a semi in Rickmansworth. three cheers for The City,chinless wonders and Posh Pies(copyright)
To an extent I agree, but why would anyone pay attention to someone who actively has avoided anything financial his whole life? You literally have become a critic on something that you have sought to know nothing about, nice one brainiac
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