Last edited by The_Shooman (2008-10-22 00:38:17)

Whistling past the graveyard.

At least two of the big SR firms have more work than they can cope with at the moment. The potential problem I see coming is people slowing down the process by delaying fittings to delay payments and the firms wind up with a rising number of partial completed items for which they haven't been paid and a falling number of completions. This is going to murder cashflows.

Now would be a really good time for the smaller tailors to weed out their slow payers because in the new world those customers are poison. The survivors will be the large firms because they have the finances and the one man operations like Des Merrion because their overheads are contained. The tailors in the middle will be the ones in trouble because they have to pay outworkers (usually in cash) upfront and carry those cost until the customer eventually pays while, like most small businesses, I'm willing to bet they are overtrading.

On the plus side if the demand does fall hopefully this will weed out the weaker outworkers and improve the product.