Rachael McKelvey

• Cash is trying to be king once more
• Shrinkflation & skimpflation
• Brewing Habits have become Tea-dious
• 16 jobs for 3 years & never showed up for work
• Girls are sad in record numbers

Cash is trying to be King once more
Industry body UK Finance this week revealed that for the first time in the last decade the use of cash has risen 7% which equates to 400,000 more transactions rising to 6.4 billion cash payments since 2021. For a long time, cash has been a declining payment method, compounded by the pandemic where tapping a machine became the norm over passing around notes and coins, so why such a significant return in usage?

The increase is thought to be because more people are relying on cash to manage their finances, it’s an easy tangible way to budget in a cost-of-living crisis, with an increase in smaller limited shops it makes sense to have that physical stop in cash value as it is the mental want to reduce your spending. A spokesperson for UK Finance acknowledges, “It’s something we do tend to see in times of falling consumer confidence and economic uncertainty”.

The stats from the report are fascinating, 13% of all payments made in the UK in 2022 were by businesses but this accounted for 82% of the total value of payments made with the flipside in consumer spending, with debit card payments accounting for over half of all consumer payments made.

Shrinkflation & skimpflation
Oh I don’t want to talk about inflation anymore, yet here we are. The Bank of England is expecting inflation to stabilise during August which comes at a crucial time for the BoE whose policymakers really need to ensure that inflation doesn’t become baked into publics minds, but that’s easier said then done, even if interest rates do fall and inflation reduces that doesn’t mean the prices are right.

Inflation is rise in all prices without a distinctive reason, everyone needs more money to buy the same amount of things, remember when Chomps cost 10p? They now retail at 25p per unit. Freddos are also a great example of how inflation gets baked into items, but there are other kinds of flation that consumers need to consider when looking at their spending power.

French supermarket Carrefour has started to warn customers about “shrinkflation” with stickers on shelves that point out where there is essentially less stuff in packets for the same price. Some big brands have been. named and shamed but arguably shrinkflation is practical way for suppliers to raise prices without having to calculate an entire new pricing strategy when nothing is certain. Another way of continuing to maintain margins is skimpflation which also seems rife across the market with reduced quality of ingredients in food, or a decrease in quality in service standards. It really has never been harder as a consumer to make informed purchasing decisions.

Brewing Habits have become Tea-dious
It’s been a rough week for PG tips, who this week revealed they had spent an eye watering £50 million on teabag innovation that will now yield the perfect brew in a mere 60 seconds. Everyone knows it takes 3 minutes to brew the perfect cup of tea but apparently times have changed, PG tips commissioned some research and found that people typically leave their teabag to brew for less than a minute so they are launching a new teabag, where the particles are now the perfect size to brew much faster and the purists are FURIOUS.

Jane Pettigrew, course director at the UK Tea Academy said “I really abhor this kind of ‘innovation’. It is not progress but a massive retrograde step backwards in what tea should be.” PG Tips account for 5 billion cups of tea a year and obviously want to meet their customers changing needs, but I can’t be the only person who thinks this is kind of a sorry state of affairs – who doesn’t have three minutes to properly brew a cup of tea please? This is also a big contributing factor in why I don’t drink tea…the only person I’d trust to make me a cup of tea is Neil (hi Neil I really love your cups of tea & even though you’re not a big coffee drinker that you heat the machine before you make one is EVERYTHING)

16 jobs for 3 years & never showed up for work
Sometimes I worry that I am committing wage fraud when my brain isn’t working and I’ve stared that the screen wondering why my formula won’t work only to realise it’s because I can’t spell but it was reported this month that a Chinese women, known only by her alias Guan Yue, held 16 separate jobs for 3 years and never showed up for a single days work allegedly netting herself a whopping $7million.

My tiny mind cannot comprehend the effort required to commit this level of fraud, except the only two qualities of an individual required to commit fraud are for them to be crooked and stupid, because apparently Yue co-ordinated this massive effort entirely on a piece of paper with 53 other fake employees. When she got too much work she would pass work off to friends and take a commission, she would take pictures of the interviews and put them in companies chat channels as proof of client meetings.

It all started to unravel when one of the fake employees shared a screenshot that looked like they worked for someone else in a work chat. In total 53 people have been arrested, apparently labour fraud isn’t uncommon in China with an estimated 700-800 groups taking on multiple jobs.

Girls are sad in record numbers
Girlguiding released their 15^th ‘Girls’ Attitudes Survey’ this week exploring how girls feel about their lives, their aspirations, the pressures they face and the things they care about. This years findings revealed that girls happiness has significantly declined over the past 15 years with only 17% of girls aged 7-21 saying they feel very happy compared to 40% in 2009, which seems a lot especially coupled with the statistic that over the same time span there has been an 11% increase in feelings of anxiousness and worry around their appearance, online harm and sexual harassment.

The report is well worth a read, but is quite a depressing read, they believe finding a job when they leave education will be harder than ever, they are placing greater value on owning their own home over having a partner or being married or having a worthwhile job…which seems understandable given the current climate, but well…a little sad.

Current watch: Daisy Maskell: Insomnia and Me – KISS FMs breakfast presenter Daisy Maskell examines the prevalence of insomnia in young people, she has suffered herself since early childhood. As you can imagine still being up at 3am when you’re a early morning radio DJ is not the one and she is concerned about the long term impacts on her health but she is not alone. The stats in the documentary are quite something, apparently almost half of 16-24-year-olds stated that they sleep significantly fewer hours than they did before the pandemic compared to a third of those aged 35 years and older.

Daisy speaks to friends she’s met through her insomnia diaries and experts to get advice and support to see if she can get a better nights sleep. Sleep is such a big thing, I don’t think I’ve spoken to many regular people in my life this week without talking about sleep. The emotional impact and the links to other mental health conditions in this documentary is really important.

Current read: Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights by Helen Lewis – Oof, this book. Well-behave women don’t make history, difficult women do but so rarely are the remembered in history, all too often erased for being difficult. Helen Lewis beautifully articulates the complexities of feminism, through some truly imperfect women who have all but been erased from the stories of the feminist movement from the start of the movement right up to the present day.

I couldn’t put this book down, I wanted to know who was coming next, the perfect blend of narrative, interviews and archival research from some of the dustiest and mustiest places and while I’ve made this sound probably rather depressing, the book does highlight the successes of the movement and what it should do next with the words “The battle is difficult, and we must be difficult too” ringing in your ears.

Most Impactful Listen: Lego Overboard – This was fascinating, you can’t have missed that a significant amount of Lego is found by beach combers on the south coast, back in 1997 a cargo ship called Tokyo Express lost 62 containers in severe weather, only one of which contained Lego but even today, there are still some remnants to be found. The inventory of the container has been made available and the hunt is on to find it all, the real impact of how something that happened nearly two decades ago is still being washed up on the beaches and hidden by sand and sea. This episode is just fantastic, it speaks to a number of breach combers about their favourite finds, the dragons, the octopuses, the tiny flowers, the pirates cutlass. I am absolutely obsessed with Lego Lost At Sea on Twitter for exactly this reason, they share their finds. A lovely bit of escapism