Hey Spruce,
If we are locked down come winter and you combine that with a prolonged spell of bad weather. It would be nice to have the money in the bank. If we're fine I'll invest the money in the business. We'll all have to pay for the governments borrowing via higher taxes/ national insurance. So I will take my chances, you never know.
As I said earlier, this is a call each one of us has to make themselves.
But I can't help thinking about my experience in a past life when I worked as National After Sales Service Manager for Bosch Power Tools in South Africa.
South Africans generally had the 'if its for free then its for me' attitude to life.
I was in Germany for 6 weeks back in 1988. The trade unions has just finished negotiating a new 36 hour week for the staff working on the factory floor. It was on the Friday afternoon my counterpart in Germany and I walked into the staff canteen at around 3pm which was the beginning of a coffee break time for the factory staff.
I asked them why they are still working as their 36 hours was up and they weren't getting paid overtime. The answer was that they weren't bothered about the new working hours as "the country couldn't afford it." (The Germans were avid recyclers back in 1988 where paper, plastics and household rubbish were separated at source. When I asked why they did my counterpart in Germany stated that they wanted their children to inherit a clean country. By 1990 Bosch had put in place a power tool recycling system in Germany and in Switzerland.)
When I went back to Germany in 1990 for a service managers conference a large portion of the factory workers car park was empty. Bosch had moved most of the production lines to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and those workers at Leinfelden near Stuttgart were made redundant. For me this was a lesson learnt in looking at the bigger picture.
Bosch in South Africa bought a whole consignment of power tools that were made in Mexico for the Christmas sales in December 1992. They were still manufacturing the old models of power tools in Mexico, much like the VW Beetle.
