Fifteen percent - an update

So it’s true. From Monday I will be altering my till and my banking spreadsheets to reflect a 13 month change in VAT.

Further to Fantasy Flight’s price increases, Esdevium have informed me that Privateer Press have followed suit.

The fantastic new CMG game, Monsterpocalypse, has been a nice hit here in Cheltenham. Primarily amongst the gamers I know. There have been, rumbles shall we say, that I have favoured that game over other new games or expansions for older games.

Truth is, Monsterpocalypse came out at a time when everything else was delayed or just simply absent from the schedules. I thought it looked interesting but was hesitant to stock any new game, but interest from three disparate gamers from different groups of friends suggested that it was worth a punt. It has worked well for the store and it’s a good game so I don’t feel like I’ve shilled a turd. So to speak.

I digress. Monsterpocalypse has now gone up by £1.75 trade price per starter, increasing the price by £2 on the RRP. The boosters have gone up less, only 40 pence, so thankfully that can be absorbed by the VAT decrease.

But once again, I can’t offer any discount to customers who are expecting to see savings instore in light of the 15% rate of VAT.In fact, new editions of the MonPoc starter will go up by £2 as I say. Sigh.

Today is also the first Proud Lion tournament, for Monsterpocalypse no less. We have limited edition monsters for the winners, but support from Privateer Press other than that has been sadly lacking., Despite registering for their website, we aren’t listed - perhaps cos we are in the UK. I had the same trouble with Wizards Of The Coast the other year whilst at Swin City.

The tournament has been dogged by other problems too. The instore posters were wrongly printed by the reprographics house so we had to go without those (they wanted me to pay for their mistake before they’d print corrected ones, disgraceful).

One player cannot make it now after being let down by a colleague who would have covered his shifts, another has not responded and I believe two others will be working. i’m wondering if a Sunday would have been a better bet.

All in all, I’m a little despondent about it. Hopefully the players that do show will have a good time. Currently it’s single round elimination tournament but if it is fewer players then I’ll probably go to a league table system for the day.

We shall see. I’ll update this later…

UPDATE

Well, we did go with the league table system and it all went very well! Kudos to all the players for making the most of it and turning a possibly failed event into something very fun.

More events are planned for the New Year and hopefully with a few days of under my belt I shall be full of renewed vigour!

Fifteen percent

So what a fascinating couple of days.

Amongst the package of financial aid that is being hinted as to come in the Budget, there is a proposed decrease to the rate of VAT. 2.5% is set to come off the rate of VAT if rumours are to believed, taking it down from 17.5% to 15%.

Wow, oooo, that’s great, I said yesterday. It’s been 17.5% for as long as we can remember we concluded during a very brief conflab. That’ll really change things.

Then the cold light of day hit me and on the way into work this morning I realised, bollocks will it. Damn. More on that in a moment, complete with specific examples from my own business.

But first, the history of VAT. The idea of charging tax on retail sales was devised by a Frenchman called Maurice Lauré. What a bastard. Though I gather from my research it was first suggested by a German in the 18th Century. Sigh.

The Direction générale des impôts, was introduced with effect from 10 April 1954 for large businesses in France.

These days EU VAT is compulsory for all EU member states. The maximum allowed VAT rate is 25% and the minimum is 15%. In 1973, the UK joined the EU and VAT replaced the previous Sales Tax system.

Today, the UK charges VAT on most things at 17.5%. Certain things are exempt, others are zero-rated (such as food, books and newspapers) and others are charged at a lower rate of 5% - mostly domestic fuel like gas and electricity.

How does it work? (taken from the BBC website)

The answer to this conundrum is best displayed using an example. Perhaps we should take the manufacture of small hand-towels.

A farmer would produce the wool required to make the towel. He would sell this to the towel-maker. For this wool he may charge £100,000 plus VAT at 17.5%. The VAT on this (in the UK) would be £17,500. The towel-maker would therefore pay the farmer £117,500. Of this amount, the farmer would pay the Government £17,500 and retain £100,000.

The towel-maker can reclaim from the Government £17,500 so the wool only costs £100,000. Once the towels are made he/she would sell some of the towels to a shop for £100 plus VAT of £17.50. The £17.50 is paid over to the government.

The shop would reclaim the £17.50 from the government and sell a pack of towels for £10 plus VAT of £1.75. The £1.75 is paid to the government.

The end consumer pays £11.75 for the towels, of which £1.75 is tax. He/she is not entitled to reclaim this amount and the government gets to keep the cash.

So why is it so difficult? (again from the BBC website)

All looks quite simple doesn’t? Ah ha! Well there’s the rub. When the VAT system was devised, some goods and services were thought to be so important that you should pay less tax (or none) on them. This was done in two ways: zero rating and exemption.

Zero Rating: The retailer charges the consumer VAT at a rate of 0%. The retailer can reclaim any VAT it is charged and the goods are therefore not taxed at any time.

Exemption: The retailer charges no tax on the goods or services. However the retailer is not entitled to reclaim any VAT it incurs. Tax is therefore collected one step up the chain on a lesser amount (it does not include the mark-up made by the retailer).

So that’s VAT in a Top Gear-esque nut shell.

So a cut of 2.5% will be a big help in these hard times right?

Uh, no.

It doesn’t put any extra money in a person’s pocket for the essentials. It only saves you money when you buy something you may not need.

Food is zero rated, unless you’re dining out. Then the standard VAT rate applies. But if you’re truly on a budget, why are you eating out more than once a month if indeed that?

Newspapers, books, magazines, comic books, etc are also zero rated. So again, no price change.

Utility bills are charged at 5% so they won’t be affected. Council tax doesn’t have VAT on it obviously so no change there and rent is only charged with VAT on business rents, so homes will not be affected.

Frankly, the only bills that might come down for the average person are phone bills - both mobile and home (including internet) and travel costs.

A 2.5% cut will not make you better off. It will just save you money on stuff like DVDs, TVs, video games, sofas, washing machines, etc, etc. So, great if it comes before Christmas, you’ll save money on your Christmas shopping.

But will you really?

Again, no. Or at least probably not.

You see a 2.5% decrease in VAT doesn’t compensate how weak the pound has become in the past year. At the start of 2008 the exchange rate was comfortably near $2 to the £1. As of today it is $1.5 to the £1 according to xe.com and at points last week it was lower than that!

That’s a decrease of 25% in 12 months! Suddenly 2.5% looks rubbish, right? To those of you who haven’t caught my drift, let me elaborate. We are an island nation. Much of products we consumers buy these days comes from overseas. And a lot of that trade is done in US dollars. It was considered to be a stable currency and the USA is the biggest capitalist nation in the world, stands to reason that money tied up in their currency is safer than say Zimbabwean dollars.

So something we Brits we importing at a cost of $100 in January, was costing £50. Now it costs £66.67. That’s £16.67 more in less than a year. Distributors and retailers face the realisation they need to do the undesirable option of raising the retail price or risk destroying their gross profit margin.

Boo hoo you think, but remember gross profit is simply the pot that said company uses to pay all of their expenses. Net profit or their actual profit is calculated after all the expenses are removed. And the things that are making life hard for the general public - increased fuel prices, etc - are also affecting businesses. So retail sales are down, costs are up across the board and Government throws out a paltry 2.5% decrease in VAT?

One that’s temporary too. It has been said that the VAT rate will go back up to 17.5% at a later date.

The most that will do is allow small retailers to keep prices down over the festive period. To absorb the price increase from the falling Pound and continue to trade rather than offer any immediate discounts.

Let’s take my business for example.

If we break my business down into three areas, comics/graphic novels, games and RPG and merchandise including t-shirts, only half of my products are affected by the VAT drop.

Comics, graphic novels and roleplaying books are all zero-rated items. No VAT is charged or collected on them. So the price remains unchanged.

Toys, boardgames and t-shirts will be affected. But almost all of this product in a comic shop such as mine is imported by UK distributors from US manufacturers. So they are affected by the changing price of the Pound against the Dollar.

Last week, US games manufacturer Fantasy Flight increased all of it’s prices as well! So my supplier Esdevium informed me of the new trade prices

Their popular Call Of Cthulhu boardgame Arkham Horror went up £4.60 in one week! The resulting increase in the retail price sees it go up to £40. Of which the Government currently gets £5.96 in VAT. It used to £35 with £5.21 to the Taxman.

The cut in VAT will change that to a retail price of £40 and £5.22 of VAT. So it’s gone up £5 at the till, it’s costing me £4.60 more to buy in and the Government aid comes to a whopping 74p. Wow.

I won’t lie. The tax cut will mean I make slightly more money on a copy of Arkham Horror. About the same amount as a Kit-Kat. So whilst I could pass that on to the consumer - overlooking the fact my other overheads have increased such as electricity and my own personal living expenses - it is hardly the massive drop in price that the 2.5% VAT cut is being presented as by the media.

And the media are the ones who exacerbated the credit crunch in to a recession/economic down turn/today’s media buzz word for we’re all fucked in the first place.

Sigh.

Nice try Labour, almost a socialist idea for your first time in nearly a decade - cut 2.5% off VAT and then charge the fat cats even more.

But frankly it won’t help me or my customers. Not anytime soon.

Fresh eyes, bad foot

Typical isn’t it? You have a bad day, you blog about it. You get all the negativity out and feel a bit better. Then you have a nice evening, a couple of good days and you want to blog about that to balance it all out and then Live Blog goes down!

Well, it’s back now so here goes.

Wednesday night I caught up with an old friend, the beautiful Kate, in Cheltenham. I got chance to show here the shop too and despite not being remotely into comics she loved the shop. Loved the look of it, the reality of it all. It was really great as seeing it through someone else’s eyes made me realise how much I have achieved this year.

It’s easy to take for granted the things you do to change and improve your life and that of those around you. Days blur into one, weeks become months and what was once a source of great pride can become commonplace and everyday.

Suffice to say, my batteries got a massive recharge, so huge thanks to Kate, currently mid-air between the UK and the US as I write this. She’s embarking on a three week holiday of a lifetime. Good luck matey - have a superb time!

Mind you, Kate was not the sole provider of love and support that week. The other wonderful thing to happen this year is I’ve met a great group of friends down here in Cheltenham, who always rally round when I’m low.

The friends in Swindon have all drifted apart and whilst I love ‘em to bits - real life, social politics and the boring business of growing up have slowed them down. The true friends form Swindon still make an effort, and I with them, but frankly I don’t miss the town anything like as much as I thought I would! So that’s another feather in the cap of the previously maligned 2008. Thanks guys!

I’m also loving the BSG game. I am concerned athat I will overplay it, but so far the game retains variety and the sheer tension that made the first play so captivating. Game of the year? Good well be.

The shitty part of the rest of last week was the accident or whatever with my foot. Perhaps it’s gout - in layman’s terms, the crystallisation of acidic chemicals that would otherwise be flushed out in your urine.

Instead these build up on joints and form needle like crystals that jab into the nerves and tissue causing swelling and intense pain. Stereotypically it affects the obese, though it is linked more to the acidity of your diet than your actual weight.

In the same way that the body can only excise so much alcohol, it can also only process so much uric acid. This is found in foods ranging from almost all meat, to vegetables like asparagus, mushrooms and cauliflower, to pulses like lentils and split peas.

So it could be that, but it is the top of foot that I’ve hurt - along the tendon that runs from the big toe back to the ankle. The most likely explanation is I put it between the metal bars of my bed frame in the night then turned over. I always was a violent sleeper, as a kid I used to sleep in a single bed next to a wall and was forever trying to bash my brains out!

Strange thing is, I did dream that someone was breaking my foot that night, which many have told me was my body reacting to the external stimuli.

Either way, it’s been swollen like a melon and really hard to walk on. I’ve been gobbling down Ibuprofen and being thankful that I don’t take painkillers for smaller headaches and pains. Plus I found a copraxamol left in my medicine bag and necked that on day two. Though it was stupidly on an empty stomach so I nearly threw up ten minutes later at the bus stop! Ooops.

It seems to be getting better now, so I’m going to attempt to do my final 50 lengths tonight. Final 50 of the swim challenge that is. 1064 lengths or 22 miles in less than 12 weeks. I’ll have raised £100 for the spinal injury charity, Aspire. It’s not too late to sponsor me, head to the link here - http://www.justgiving.com/benfardon

I’ll shall probably blog again later, as I want to talk about the proposed 15% VAT rate. But I’d best do some work first!

Nothing clever or [insert witty comment here]

Today I’m feeling tired, run down, unloved, lonely, unmotivated, hurt and empty. It all seems bloody pointless.

I’m really craving an extra day off, some more time for me. I really wish I was seeing more results from the exercise - i know I have to combine it with improving my diet but time and money is against me and so I’m still mostly eating rubbish.

Everything seems to be being made extra difficult recently. Battles with the landlord, the water board (they wanted to cut off next door, but that would cut me off too and I’m a fully paid up customer!!!), ignorant customers - I’m gonna say it. CUNTS! - and now a message from my old boss has rattled my cage.

What’s the point of it all? I’m only slightly happier running my own shop. Let’s be honest. I would be much happier if there was economic doom and gloom scaring the shit out of me and halting what had initially been reasonable growth. Everyone seems to want to stitch you up if you’re self employed from Government to friends.

This is why I don’t vote. No one has good policies that will improve my life or fall in lie with my beliefs and morals. The majority rules idiocracy we have means that if 30% of the country votes for one party and the remaining 70% vote for others but in smaller segments, that 30% gets power even though 70% said no to them.

Give me proportional representation and I’ll vote again. Till then it is wasted. A vote for Labour or Tory is a vote for the same shit wrapped in a different bow.

I know I’m out of sync having morals - to get ahead now you need to be the kind of person who will fuck over people on house prices, renege on deals to get leverage, etc.

But I wasn’t raised that way. In fact I think people like that are scum. Why am I even friends with people like that? I know it’s all speculation, no one has actually done that to me but some have admitted they see no problem in that and that worries me.

Actually it makes me downright furious.

So as the end of 2008 looms what do I want for Christmas and for 2009?

I want everything to be just a bit easier. I want someone to share the load, someone to confide in, to cuddle, and to be able to do that for them. I want a relationship that compliments my life doesn’t destroy it. Again.

I want to continue to lose weight. I want to eat better. I want to feel less run down, and have more energy.

I want to smile more, not just laugh and hide my true feelings. I want to not have to bite through my tongue rather than be honest.

I want to be more successful and feel that the shop is doing really well rather than surviving.

I want my dear friends to do well and be happy. And I want the people who are obnoxious to us to get their comeuppance. Petty maybe, but true.

I want to write again and feel pleased with the words, characters, dialogue and stories I craft.

I want to stop having to put the toilet roll tubes in the bin myself - seriously how hard is it to cross a room and bin a cardboard tube for fucks sake? I also want the lights in rooms that are empty to be turned off so I don’t end up paying 40% of wasted electricity. Teahc the planet a lesson on your own coin for fuck’s sake! :)

I ended 2007 keeping my goals and problems to myself. Let’s see if doing the reverse at the end of 2008, improves 2009…

The closest I will ever get to talking about religion and theology

I babble on about Babylon 5 more often than perhaps I should but perhaps because within it, whilst writing for Delenn, JMS gets closer to my feelings about the theology and belief than anyone else ever as. More eloquent than I could be. Granted, it is twee in places but there you go.

Here are the lines that best sum my feelings up -

“Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective.”
Ambassador Delenn, A Distant Star

“We do not have cats on Minbar, we have gogs.”
“Gogs?”
“Gogs. Such creatures are an attempt by the universe to make sure that we never take ourselves too seriously.”
Delenn and Sheridan, A Race Through Dark Places

“Don’t look away, Captain. All life is transitory, a dream. We all come together in the same place, at the end of time. If I don’t see you again here, I will see you, in a little while, in a place where no shadows fall.”
Delenn, Confessions and Lamentations

“What does the candle represent?”
“Life.”
“Whose life?”
“All life, every life. We’re all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars, molecules that do not understand politics, policies and differences. In a billion years we, foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. Desperate acts of ego. We give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps. And pretend our light is better than everyone else’s. The flame reminds us of the piece of those stars that live inside us. A spark that tells us: you should know better. The flame also reminds us that life is precious, as each flame is unique. When it goes out, it’s gone forever. And there will never be another quite like it. So many candles will go out tonight. I wonder some days if we can see anything at all.”
Sheridan and Delenn, And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder