I’m not fronting when I tell you that I won the Business Studies prize two years in a row at school, (fronting would be telling you I won the economics prize, but alas,) I’m just giving validity to an assertion I am about to make:
Milkshake consumption is about to go through the roof.
Let’s get technical. The dark blue line on the graph below shows the UK GDP growth rate over time. You can see two big dips in my lifetime, the first in 1991, which happens to coincide with Jamie Lipman’s birthday party in McDonald's, Bromely, and my discovery that a) you can order boxes of 20 nuggets (something I have been doing ever since,) and b) McDonald’s milkshakes are an unbelievable treat and one should not be put off by a heckling mob of seven-year-olds claiming they use pigs feet to make the milkshakes, (they did, for the gelatine, I believe, but they do not any more, not that it ever mattered a jot to me.) The second dip is in 2008/09 and coincides with the sub-prime mortgage fuelled global banking collapse, my departure from a well-paid job to become an ‘entrepreneur’, as well as my discovery of a fledgling burger business called Byron which, above all else, served the best Milkshakes I had ever tasted. I won’t be alone in finding that their Oreo milkshake served in an ice-cold metal blender cup, it’s exterior dripping pleasingly with condensation, was the tonic we all needed in tough times. For all the light blue line in the graphic below represents the unemployment rate in the last 50 years, it might as well stand for my milkshake consumption from 1984 until now - it rises when the economy tanks.
As mentioned above, I won the business studies prize rather than the economics prize, but that shouldn't mean my inherent assertion that we are tumbling towards (aka have already stepped off the precipice of) a recession, a housing price correction, and quite staggering unemployment and/or financial pain for the majority of the country, won’t be true. It will be. There will also be another uptick in milkshake consumption.
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