The depressing thing about the "all business that turn over £100k" threshold is that margins on mass market electronics (i.e. not Apple, not B&O) are paper thin. A retail business selling £100k of Binatone boom boxes is doing extremely well to yield £5k of net profit - or half that if it's a bricks & mortar business - but idiots (in which I include politicians and everyone who believes 'their' politicians) will just see the 100k and think that's a high bar, which will spare the small town retail minnows from the burden, whereas there are probably car boot sales that would end up in the bracket.
"We all know that stuff’s cheaper wholesale than retail. A container of computers is cheaper per computer than the one computer off the shop shelf. But you do have to take 10,000 of them at a time."
Acksherly (having been responsible for bulk PC purchasing in 000s pa, albeit 25 years ago), computers (PCs and laptops, anyway) are another exception to this general rule. The optimal value for money one-off is probably the bargain bin at your local Currys (or wherever), which can be very cheap because they want rid. If you want a dozen or so at a time, you might find a warehouse somewhere that's holding this amount and the owners are worried about how they're depreciating, so they want rid, too and may cut you a deal. But if you want a thousand-off, somebody's going to have to manufacture them - Dell or Lenovo, say - and they aren't going to do that at a loss; so they can actually be more expensive than a single unit. Weird, I know.
Anyway, the likes of AO, and others, have been offering to take away your old white goods when delivering your new one, for many years. A quick gander suggests the white goods price, retail, is about 14p per kilo, washing machines will be about 60Kg, so about eight and a half quid.
Alternatively, you could strip the thing down yourself, and get the price for the motor, steel, copper and ally, and get slightly more. Or, if it's still working ok, just flog the bloody thing on Facebook, get fifty or a hundred quid or whatever.
Although, in that last instance, it seems that the recycling effort destroys, at retail scrap prices, some large amount of value.
Similar to what they are doing with the bottle recycling machines in Ireland (and Scotland?) although they're only for plastic and cans in Ireland. Divert a flow of recyclables which were already going into recycling bins intoba new deposit based system. Small shops cannot afford the machines, small suppliers may stop selling product here because it's not worth their while to produce the special labelling...
The depressing thing about the "all business that turn over £100k" threshold is that margins on mass market electronics (i.e. not Apple, not B&O) are paper thin. A retail business selling £100k of Binatone boom boxes is doing extremely well to yield £5k of net profit - or half that if it's a bricks & mortar business - but idiots (in which I include politicians and everyone who believes 'their' politicians) will just see the 100k and think that's a high bar, which will spare the small town retail minnows from the burden, whereas there are probably car boot sales that would end up in the bracket.
Quite. Plenty of one man Amazon sellers would hit that....
So Amazon pick up the burden, build it into the seller's fees, and actually make a tidy profit on the deal.
Has Bill Gates started buying scrap yards, by any chance?
"We all know that stuff’s cheaper wholesale than retail. A container of computers is cheaper per computer than the one computer off the shop shelf. But you do have to take 10,000 of them at a time."
Acksherly (having been responsible for bulk PC purchasing in 000s pa, albeit 25 years ago), computers (PCs and laptops, anyway) are another exception to this general rule. The optimal value for money one-off is probably the bargain bin at your local Currys (or wherever), which can be very cheap because they want rid. If you want a dozen or so at a time, you might find a warehouse somewhere that's holding this amount and the owners are worried about how they're depreciating, so they want rid, too and may cut you a deal. But if you want a thousand-off, somebody's going to have to manufacture them - Dell or Lenovo, say - and they aren't going to do that at a loss; so they can actually be more expensive than a single unit. Weird, I know.
Amusing that the boy Cowen posted on monopolized organ collection in the US, which hit my inbox this very morning; https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/monopolized-organ-collection.html.
Anyway, the likes of AO, and others, have been offering to take away your old white goods when delivering your new one, for many years. A quick gander suggests the white goods price, retail, is about 14p per kilo, washing machines will be about 60Kg, so about eight and a half quid.
Alternatively, you could strip the thing down yourself, and get the price for the motor, steel, copper and ally, and get slightly more. Or, if it's still working ok, just flog the bloody thing on Facebook, get fifty or a hundred quid or whatever.
Although, in that last instance, it seems that the recycling effort destroys, at retail scrap prices, some large amount of value.
“The government is being insane here.” Another normal day in Whitehall then.
Similar to what they are doing with the bottle recycling machines in Ireland (and Scotland?) although they're only for plastic and cans in Ireland. Divert a flow of recyclables which were already going into recycling bins intoba new deposit based system. Small shops cannot afford the machines, small suppliers may stop selling product here because it's not worth their while to produce the special labelling...
Yep, my views on that are fairly sulphurous too.