Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

If you wanted to send a small amount of money to someone, for most people the simplest thing to do is to either pop a cheque in the post or simply to post the cash. If it’s a large chunk of cash then cheques and bank transfers are the way to go normally.

However, what if it’s a sum that lies in the middle ground and you want to send it internationally? For most people the answer isn’t nearly so cut and dried there. For instance, if you were sending EUR 200 from the UK to France or vice versa you’d be looking at around £25/EUR 20 in bank charges for the cheque or transfer and that’s before you factor in the tourist rate of exchange that you’d be getting.

If it’s a company you’re sending it to then you could use a credit/debit card of course, but that’s not really an option for an individual, is it? Well, actually these days it is as the person you’re sending it to could have a paypal account in which case, if they upgrade it to a premium account, then they could take the money off you at a cost of around 4%.

However, if it’s a family member a more practical way is to pop into the post office and pick up a travel money card and just post it to them. There’s no security risk as you can wait ’til it arrives before enabling the card. It costs around 4% to exchange the money from sterling to euros or dollars and it’ll be £5 or so two years later to renew it.

Although we set off for France with the intention of spending the rest of our lives here, in practice I left on a career break which left open the chance of me returning to work at any time up to five years from my departure from work way back on February 20th 2004.

Whilst at the time we thought of it as essentially free unemployment insurance, as y’all know we’re currently in the process of returning and with the global economy being in the current mess that notional “free insurance” has turned out to be quite valuable to us now. Not only do I have a guaranteed job waiting for me, but it’s a nice safe one at that and seems a good place to be sitting to ride out the coming recession/depression for the next year or two.

Although obviously not everyone will have the opportunity to leave on a career break, it’s definitely worth taking that route just in case things don’t work out. If they do work out then there’s no downside as you don’t have to return from a career break but on t’other hand if they don’t or your plans change as ours did…

Not a massive one but a jump nonetheless.

Chances are that it’s down to one of the oddities of the recession. Most of our internet income comes via the stable of accommodation listings sites that we run. Since holiday accommodation falls in the category of discretionary expenditure you’d think that this income would go down quite sharply during a recession. So it did initially, but the accommodation owners read the news too and have realised that their income should be dropping. This in turn means that they start advertising more which initially showed up in increased numbers of new entries on the sites and now seems to have started to show up in increased adsense revenue.

Definitely peculiar effects, but the question is what’ll happen during the rest of the year?

Sometimes it seems that it’s purely the UK that’s in the doldrums economically at the moment whilst France appears to be sailing merrily along.

However, locally we have seen that both of the local cafés are now closed. Whilst one does close for the winter normally it’s now closed down altogether and its premises have been taken over by the local youth club. The pizza outlet is still open but sporadically whilst the hotel seems to have closed up for the winter at least if not for longer. Perhaps the best indication is the local bakers who have severely cut back on their production and have commented that it’s “bad everywhere”.

Perhaps most tellingly, the toy shop was virtually empty at the peak of the Christmas shopping season.

So, whilst at the top level all seems relatively OK, the bottom level tells quite a different story.

We’re in the midst of our customary Christmas closing and generally lazing around at the moment.

Boxing Day brought us our first serious bought of snow for several years and for a while it was looking like we’d be snowed in for quite a while. As usual the French didn’t even bother to slow down on roads completely covered with ice and snow so I’m sure that the accident figures are well up.

France is a slightly peculiar place to be over Christmas in that they don’t formally “do” Christmas thus the shops were relatively empty on Christmas Eve and indeed the toy shops were eerily empty even the week before Christmas. Just as eerily empty as the toy shops in the UK were a few weeks earlier though that presumably was down to the current recession.

Although the shops do close several hours early (as does the post office) on Christmas Eve and everything is closed on Christmas Day, by Boxing Day it’s back to normal everywhere and you’d think that it was a normal shopping day. The law doesn’t allow them to have sales at the moment so you don’t get the usual post-Christmas sales that you do elsewhere and nowhere do you get the 70%+ reductions that are commonplace nowadays because the law won’t let shops sell stuff at a loss (which should create interesting closing down sales in due course).

On the sale front, we were comparing prices with the UK and found a surprising number of things sitting at around two to three times the UK prices at the current exchange rate. Obviously with all the shenanaghans recently with the interest rates  the exchange rates are not really at their “true” levels and if the price differentials are anything to go by it should be around EUR 2 to the pound rather than the current 1.10 or so which implies that there’s going to be either a major drop in the euro interest rate or massive increases in unemployment in the euro zone.