What is value?

This little idea has been pulling at the back of my mind for the last while. There is this disparity between the cost of hosting in a business venue and the expectation of the British people’s conditioned reluctance to pay for things.

The physical cost of rent, rates, services, ingredients, and if you can hire them;  p e o p l e make delivering quality drinks and food at retail a huge challenge at the moment. Before C19 I think there was a velocity factor, which I can only imagine is about high volumes of low margins= survival. Much of this was at the expense of zero contracts and cheap labour.

As many people who work in coffee shops have relatively low or minimum wages, which equates to (wait for it) about 3 supermarket chicken lives an hour. How does this work? What is value?

In the 1970s and 80s, the Marsbar was often used as a measure of inflation. It is a long time since we have seen them in the shops for 12p! Maybe a bottle of water is a better measure now?

Imagine a bottle of water. It might cost the retailer 50p inc VAT. One shop might retail this for £1 and in another venue, this could be £5 or £10. It could be served on a silver platter by a butler or out of the back of a catering trailer at an event. This is about valuing an environment versus what people are prepared to pay; or what a venue dictates to vendors what they must sell at.

I struggle to understand where people accept prices in some environments and not others.