Strange how things work out isn't it. Only 15 miles from Fleet (absolute) and our town is suffering. Started about 10 months ago, when one of the longest terms, biggest employers shut down a large part of their production areas, there were many redundancies and people are struggling to find other work. Without really thinking about it there must be in the region of 7 or 8 similar sized company's that are in the same situation. It['s really sad, but I suppose large numbers of redundancies are helping to keep these businesses going. It happened in the early 80's around here and most survived it then, even though they had massive cutbacks. There are so many empty office and factory units at present, and you only have to look in "sits vac" every week to see what is happening. 2 years ago there would have been 8 or 9 pages of jobs, now there is 1 page and half a page of part time vacancies. It seems that small to medium businesses aren't doing too bad, but they are not employing.
A bit doom and gloom I'm afraid, but we just think of it as levelling out the for the previous years when businesses overspent when probably there was no need to.
We have never relied on getting commercial business and treat such as "bonuses", much prefer to stick with domestic (better for cashflow
We are ticking along nicely at the moment, it could be better, it could be worse, and when customers ask how we are fairing, we just say that we are doing ok and that we don't believe all they say on the TV and in the media.
