Greetings and Happy Chinese New Year!
Today is the first day of the year of the Ox (or the cow depending on who you ask), to your Chinese friends you can say: Xīnnián kuàilè.. (shin knee hen q-why le).
It's also almost Valentine's Day.. on Sunday.. probably the saddest loneliest Valentines day in history.. or at least the most Virtual Valentine Day ever. Haha it's VVD..
It's been one year and 25 days since I said goodbye to my wife at Malaga airport, the plan was I would go to Indonesia and India (for business) and get to China to see her and the family by Valentines Day.
But this year has not been normal and things didn't work that way.. if you have been following this newsletter you will know all the details..
Last week.. which already seems like another age.. I was telling you about how nothing is normal.. and a quick round up of AW life around the world. you can read about it here.
Last year was the year of the rat.. rats, those nasty creatures.. bringer of plagues. Kind of fitting in retrospect especially when it seemed like the reckless rats were in charge. The Ox on the other hand is the symbol of steady hard work, rebuilding and regrowth. Let's hope 2021 is a year of rebuilding. A year in which the steady sensible hardworking types take over from the reckless rats.
But let's face it the world has changed, everything has changed. I have been thinking about this a lot lately. The marco events that have hit the earth like meteorites from space are..
1. Tribalism fueled by social media. Symptoms of which are nationalist leaders around the world causing things like Brexit, trade wars and reducing productivity money like crazy.
2. The Pandemic. Has affected the world in all sorts of terrible ways, including the cost of fighting it. Less obvious, but important is the reduced productivity as people sit at home not producing anything.
3. QE. Quantitative easing. Basically means governments are printing money and buying stuff with it.. to fix the world's problems (whilst making super rich people even more rich), but risking massive inflation. It worked in 2007 because everyone got busy with that extra money.
4. Global warming needs to be fixed and at some further cost.
Some say QE without increased productivity is going to brew the mother of all economic storms.
Let's hope we can weather the storm.. it's already cold enough in the UK.. But one thing is for sure, in times of trouble folks still give each other comforting gifts, they increasingly want to make their homes more homely and safe.
And stuff.. (gold, houses, crypto, giftware stock) as opposed to money cannot be devalued. Well crypto currency is a gamble it could go down, but at least the governments of the world are not messing with it.
Stock and crypto is probably better than cash right now, well stock that doesn't have a date life. Obviously fresh fish is not a good investment.
So at AW we have been buying stock like mad. Five containers arrived this week.. To house it we are building 6000 racking locations in our Affinity warehouse in Sheffield, which will be finished on Sunday. Next week another five containers are expected.
That means lots of items back in stock.. even some new products coming from India. In our EU warehouses also we are stocking up as trade diverts from the UK to the EU..
We are still doing our best to ship to our loyal long suffering EU customers direct from the UK using our "Brexit Bridge". This is where we sell a whole truck load of orders from AW UK to AW Slovakia, who pay the duty, vat and import charges.. and then we deliver to the EU customers.. easy. NOT easy.. yesterday Tomas was almost crying, Katka was stressed.. as quickly as we fix the problems customs in the EU find more for us. You have read the news about the number of forms being filled in, and if you don't use black ink are rejected. That's nothing, it is much worse. Fortunately we have been importing from outside the EU for 20 years so we know how it works.
Four uniformed customs guys turned up at our warehouse in Slovakia, aggressively demanding to check individual products. 500 cartons, how do you find the carton with the particular product in it they wanted to see? Well Raul our IT guy quickly wrote the software to identify the carton requested.. they were determined to find something with the wrong tariff code, something under valued, something miss described. One guy said to the staff the directors (that's me and Tomas) will be facing criminal offences. Tomas had travelled to the UK was self isolating and had to deal with all this from his bedroom. They of course didn't find anything but to be called a criminal is another level of stress. At AW we are whiter than white, we pay all taxes, we use the tariffs always as suggested by customs whatever the duty charged. Tomas almost cried last night, he told me he doesn't want to do this crap. He wants to be productive, design and make great products to make our customers happy. And I agree.
Lots of companies have already given up shipping to the EU, we will continue, for now. But it's not the best service we can give our customers.
Anyway peace, love and forgiveness are the antidotes to this kind of nastiness affecting simply doing business.. and as it is practically valentines day let spread the love..
Hope you can have a best possible weekend and survie the Beast from the East 2, and whatever else you need to deal with.
Take care, stay safe, virtual hugs.
Happy Year of the OX.