‘Please rate our service’

In truth it was so mundane and functional you barely remember it, but now you’re being pestered to pick an emoji that best represents the transaction. You’re in the shop doorway wondering which smiley face ‘being handed the thing and paying’ would be. Eventually you hit one at random and, six months down the line, a cashier is denied a pay rise.

‘Unlock 20 per cent discount on your next visit’

You know when this would have been handy? Around 180 seconds ago, when you paid. Now you feel ripped off and the urge to walk straight back in there and get your f**king discount. You’re not going to, but you will save this email until next time you need it which will be five days after it expires.

‘You’ve got a free [insert consumable product]’

You’ve collected ten stamps on the loyalty app and now you’re eligible for a free item. Not the one you just bought, obviously, the next one. And now you have to go back to claim your free item, which rewards you with one stamp and begins the whole vicious cycle all over again. Don’t forget your birthday reward next week.

‘Here’s a summary of your activity’

Ideal for those with chronic short-term memory issues, an email thanking you for your visit, hoping you enjoy the activated charcoal insoles, and suggesting that if you did you could take out a subscription for them. All of which seems a bit premature because you’ve yet to discover whether they can triumph over your horrendous foot odour.

‘You could have split that purchase into three easy payments’

Could have but didn’t, making you feel somewhat of a dick for handing over money which you palpably had. And it would have been interest-free, too. Instead you’re being taunted for not paying for goods in the same way as a broke-ass teenager with a Saturday job. ‘I’ll pay however I f**king want,’ you say angrily to your phone in a Greggs queue.

‘Complete our quick satisfaction survey’

As a treasured customer, please spare two minutes to express your thoughts on your recent visit? Which means seven screens asking you to rate every aspect of your transaction. Then an email asking for an explanation of why you chose the product over similar products from other brands. Then you don’t care whether you’ll be in with a chance of winning £1,000 and delete.

The company Napoli Deliziosa is unsure whether sales would be boosted by customers being able to show off social justice logos on their coffee cups, or if they would prefer disturbing occult symbols suggesting an interest in Devil worship and possibly human sacrifice.

CEO Jack Browne said: “Helping reformed prisoners or destitute farmers in Kenya is a good thing to do. But on the other hand, pledging your allegiance to Lucifer is quite ‘edgy’ and marketable.

“We really want to get influencers on board to help us sell cheap dad caps and other junk, so we need cool logos everywhere, not just the boring Fairtrade one. And people go mad for pentagrams.

“Virality is key to brand marketing, and green stuff like sustainability is good for that. But would it increase revenues more to have shocking pull-quotes from Anton LaVey on the walls? ‘Release your hatred towards those who deserve it’ is a favourite of mine.

“Obviously good coffee is our aim, but modern customers don’t care about that and just want to feel part of some trendy philosophy. Also it will be piss-easy to make our blueberry muffins totally black with food dye.

“I’m feeling a goat-headed demon burning busty virgins is definitely more striking than an abundant tree. Let’s go for that.”

Holland & Barrett

You might think a deprived high street in an area with high unemployment and child poverty wouldn’t want a shop that charges £15 for a bag of almond flour. You would be wrong. For reasons surely related to an international conspiracy, this scam-factory is here selling all the health supplements you never knew you didn’t want.

An off-brand pound shop

The almighty itself – Poundland – died years ago. But this knockoff currency-based retailer remains, destined to mop up the prime market for criminally pungent shower gels and multipacks of toffee crisps. Its logo is so ugly it doesn’t bear looking at. Nothing within costs a pound.

Claire’s

Are you a tween girl? If not, it’s hard to fathom the vast consumer potential of hair slides and phone cases, the accessories that have kept this millennial nostalgia factory afloat while it begs to die. On the upside, the stabbings that take place here are legal, if not morally advisable for young earlobes or sanctioned by parents.

Generic women’s clothing shop

In every shopping centre’s dying stages these shady unbranded stores begin to proliferate like cockroaches post-apocalypse. Their names, placements, and signage change with the seasons, but the fashions inside remain trapped in whatever era they were inadvisably produced and immediately warehoused.

Card Factory

Greetings cards have never been easier to buy, send, or do away with altogether. But perhaps you don’t want one that’s funny, interesting, or remotely aesthetically pleasing. Fear not, for within these drab shelving units you can find the perfect card for the person you’re indifferent to, emblazoned with humour at least two decades out of date.

A perfume shop

Where the minimum wage is the median wage you’d expect scent to be the first luxury good to go, but this shop endures. A whole store dedicated to celebrity perfume should feel deliciously decadent. On closer inspection? The celebrities in question are Lauren Goodman, Helen Flanagan and Tyson Fury. Ah.

Helen Archer, translator: “By borrowing £15 million at today’s loan rates, putting it in a high-interest account at December’s rates, and living off the margin between the two. Now I just need to borrow £15 million.”

Oliver O’Connor, meme generator: “Right. And if I’ve put all my capital into Pokemon cards, where does that leave me?”

Denys Finch Hatton, historian: “You guys think this war’s going to carry on? Have you not been listening to Pete Hegseth?”

Steve Malley, civil servant: “I’m actually the bloke who goes up on the ladder and changes the big numbers on the Bank of England showing what the rate is. I get paid per job, so I’m quids in for the year.”

Susan Traherne, heiress: “Oh that is good news. I was thinking I needed to liquidate my gold. Well that calls for a little drinky-poo.”

£1,850 Israel Violently Lashed Out surcharge

No, you didn’t enter your meter readings incorrectly. Worried Trump was going soft, Israel decided to strike the South Pars energy field in Iran and gas leapt by 35 per cent. Iran retaliated, Trump sent an angry message, and now you’ll be spending the winter leaping on the sexy new trend of triple-slanketing.

£220 Suppressing Renewable Energy levy

Lobbying to make sure that clean, renewable energy remains unviable isn’t cheap. There are white papers to be discredited, Reform donations to be made and ridiculous rumours to spread about offshore windfarms. Your reasonable contribution is needed by gas companies now more than ever with the Green Menace on the rise.

£65 Smart Meter running cost

It costs energy companies a lot of money to install a snazzy little box that perpetually tots up your bill. And seeing as it whirrs away day and night, the numbers on its sinister digital display spiralling ever upwards, that’s guzzling up power. No, you can’t opt out of having one.

£120 Supplier’s Hedge fee

Despite all this, gas and oil producing countries are worried for their futures, given their only other assets are deserts. Therefore they need to hedge against sales falling whether because of solar power or a massive fall in the global population. Your money goes direct to buying football teams and holding Saudi Arabian comedy festivals.

£200 tip

You tip waitresses, so why not provide hard-working suppliers of energy with a small gratuity? After all, they’ve gone to the trouble of piping in gas from despotic nations and hastening climate change so it’s well-deserved. With this extra they can buy themselves a little treat.

William McKay, conveyancer: “Notice how it’s always the privatised businesses who come in for all this criticism. That’s victimisation, pure and simple.”

Wayne Hayes, psychiatric nurse: “I don’t see the issue with only receiving post once a week. In the Kevin Costner film The Postman they get it years late, and that was a post-apocalyptic society just like ours.”

Joanna Kramer, full-time mother: “Postmen used to have time to give you a good seeing to over the kitchen table. Now I barely have time to toss him off at the door.”

Jordan Gardner, tanning salon manager: “Royal Mail have blamed weather and illness for the problem. Well those are both new things which have never happened before so give them a break.”

Helen Archer, camgirl: “It’s all junk mail anyway! By which I mean I correspond with multiple older gentlemen who post me regular dick pics.”

Be edgy

Investors love anything ‘edgy’, so naturally they were impressed by ‘Punk IPA’. Sure, craft beer has absolutely nothing to do with punk and you won’t find any songs by The Clash about India pale ale with a hint of lychee. But at least beer is cooler than Punk Dishwasher Tablets.

Overpromise 

We made the mistake of creating a good product which is physically real. Elon Musk has taken the more efficient approach of focusing on products that exist purely in his imagination, such as moon cities and robots that actually work. So it seems the best thing to do is think ludicrously big. What about a teleportation hat that also makes people fancy you? Set up some meetings with investors, you can fill in the details later. 

Remember to pay yourself in real money  

Make sure you sell plenty of your shares for real money to put in your bank account before everything goes tits-up. The last thing you want is to be heavily invested in your own brilliant business idea.

Only have one good idea

We can all learn from Mark Zuckerberg, who came up with the excellent idea of staying in touch with your friends and relatives via simple text chats on Facebook, with some handy features like reminding you about birthdays. Once you’ve had your good idea, move on to shit ones like the Metaverse and AI glasses. It doesn’t matter if they fail disastrously because you’re already worth $264 billion.

Remember the media has no critical thinking skills

Especially true of tech companies, but it applies to any business which is vaguely interesting or zeitgeisty. Do you predict your part-time dog-walking franchise will soon be worth £6 trillion? Sky News won’t bother to google it.

Spend insane amounts of money

You may recall James Dyson’s headphones with an air-purifying mask that no one wanted because they cost £900 and made you look like Bane. That easily cost him tens of millions, but if you’re a visionary entrepreneur mistakes don’t matter. Splash £20 million on R&D for your pet project of a smart duvet that climbs inside the cover by itself.

Don’t be a boring businessperson 

The master of this was Adam Neumann, founder of WeWork, the flexible office space start-up. Adam openly did weed and tequila shots in meetings, and was so different to a typical businessman everyone forgot there weren’t enough hipster freelancers and renting a desk is a pointless faff anyway. When WeWork went bankrupt he walked away with $1 billion. A true business genius.

Reasons given for Saturday and Sunday journeys were largely frivolous, including such fripperies as ‘going shopping’ or ‘to see friends’ rather than reasons which matter like ‘I must go to my job or I will be fired’.

Rail executive Martin Bishop said: “And what about if we want a break? We can’t have one because of your leisure travel? Hardly fair.

“After a tough five days not being that late, on average, we like to sit back and let the buses do the heavy lifting. It’s not like people are in a hurry when they’re off work, is it? The nine hour bus journey from Durham to Bath is an opportunity for mindfulness.

“We put on a couple of Saturday services for trainspotters and otherwise we baselessly claim engineering work. But apparently there’s a demand, and those people on the platforms aren’t taking down numbers but are a family from Kettering with tickets for Mamma Mia.

“I suppose we could add a couple, but don’t people enjoy the shite Sunday service for the sake of tradition? Like shops closing early or Songs of Praise? What are you having a long-distance relationship for, anyway? Rethink it.

“No, on the whole I think we’re more comfortable transporting you to places of misery because you have no option but to be there. We don’t want our commuters getting ideas.”

Cabin bags must be below 45mms long but above 35km wide

Any cabin baggage must have a circumference less than a human finger, yet be longer than the distance to Leicester to Nottingham or the distance from the airport we fly you to the city we claimed we were flying you to. All exceptions will be charged at our cabin price of (Nx4), where N is the cost of your flight.

Any item of clothing with a pocket is a bag

If your clothing has pockets within it to carry items, it is a bag and will be weighed and measured with you in it and charged accordingly. Each item of clothing will be charged separately. You are welcome to remove your clothing and leave it at your departing airport but are not allowed to travel nude.

Your under-seat bag must be no larger than the Stone of Scone

If your bag fits in the Coronation Chair used by King Charles for his anointing, investiture and crowning in 2023, it travels free. All bags must be ascertained to fit in the actual chair no more than 18 hours before flying, with photographic evidence and a signed statement of witness from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Personal bags must be incorporeal

Handbags and other personal bags are permitted as long as they are intangible. Our bag-checking airport staff, all the rest having been made redundant in 2020, will attempt to pass their hands through them and if they meet even imaginary resistance you will be required to buy all empty seats on the flight. Or if the flight is full the following flight.

The overhead lockers are for gold

The overhead lockers are not for the luggage of grubby, cheap passengers but for gold, precious metals, gems and fine art valued at £500,000 or above. To place so much as a baseball cap within would violate our more exclusive passengers’ trust and incur a fine totalling the cost of the aircraft, fully-fueled.

Money is a potential bag

If you are carrying money, either in physical form or on a debit card, you could exchange that money for a bag mid-air as we make a selection of bags available from the cabin crew. We consequently require all funds held to be transferred into a proprietary Ryanair account for the duration of the flight plus 90 days. No liability is accepted.

Many cultures live perfectly happily without it, such as the Kalahari bushmen and Mexican kangaroo rats. Have we Britons got swept up by the ‘water’ fad without questioning it?

Sure, water can be useful in certain circumstances. But it’s as easy to fill a bath with fizzy drinks or make a cup of tea with boiling lager. And do men really need a hosepipe to wash their cars when they have one right there in their trousers?

A water-free life can be hugely rewarding, our customers are discovering. Lugging heavy packs of bottled water back from the supermarket is such great exercise they’re already telling us to keep not investing in infrastructure when the water comes back on!

‘But don’t you die without water?’ some of you may be thinking because you’ve listened to Big Science. The same Big Science that said smoking and Thalidomide were good for you. Are we really 60 per cent water as they claim? Of course not – you’d be like a garden sprinkler every time you cut yourself!

We should expect less of our water companies. Just because we’re called South East Water doesn’t mean we supply water to the South East. That’s a secondary function after servicing our debts and managing a complex structure of intra-company loans.

And let’s not forget all the other things water companies do, such as spending a fortune on TV adverts with slogans like ‘Quality. On tap’, for reasons opaque to everybody.

But the biggest disadvantage of water is that’s it’s dangerous. Where do sharks live? Water. What happens when it freezes and forms a massive icicle that impales you through the heart? Instant death. And you can drown in a puddle.

So let’s get a grip on our obsession with water and start looking at sustainable alternatives, such as sucking the moisture out of cacti and frogs. While still paying water bills and lobbying Ofwat for them to be higher.

Helen Archer visited the store to pick up a few fresh items for her Boxing Day buffet only to find everyone else of her demographic had been carefully separated and released into the shop for a kind of polite Hunger Games.

She said: “It was a passive-aggressive riot of Next blouses and bookshop totes, and we were not taking prisoners.

“You only had to reach for a pyramid of salted caramel profiteroles to hear a disappointed ‘oh’ and look into the face of a crushed woman who only needed that final detail to please her in-laws, who were travelling all the way from Solihull.

“I didn’t relinquish my grip, explaining sweetly that of course I’d usually make my own but I was singing in a choir in the town square on Christmas Eve and we hoped to raise £13,000 for motor neurone disease.

“That round I won. But when she reached the mini pecorino and chorizo tortillas before me, she gave me such a look.

“I know now what hell will be. A frenzy of professional women sweeping the shelves of delectable items ironically termed ‘picky bits’, all seething, all silent, all with SUVs outside. And when the bill comes it will be £137.82 for barely two bags’ worth.”

Lucy Parry, student: “There’s an old applewood wardrobe upstairs in this house I inherited which leads to a magical fairytale land. Got rid of their endless winter and they’re happily farming weed in return. A season there takes 45 minutes here. I’m coining it in.”

Denys Finch Hatton, groundskeeper: “You need a large property nobody would dare check with no intruders, an oblivious tenant and a secure electricity supply. I’ve set up in the Royal Lodge, Windsor.”

Norman Steele, agricultural scientist: “Right next to my coca leaf farm and opium poppy farm. That way the police will be distracted.”

Helen Archer, estates manager: “Hidden in a cellar only accessible behind a revolving bookcase, and I’ve spread rumours about the terrifying Reefer Reaper to keep strangers away. Aw bollocks, the Scooby gang’s van’s broken down just outside.”

Thomas Booker, comms manager: “F**k. I knew I’d forgotten something. Where did I put the bastard? It was somewhere really clever.”

Physical and online shops have happily announced that shoppers have had their chance to enjoy large discounts, cannot say they were not warned and goods will now cost up to 50 per cent more because they have shareholders to keep happy.

Retail CEO Martin Bishop said: “Delayed picking up a bargain over the weekend because you thought the low, low prices would last another week? Well, f**k you.

“We weren’t bluffing. We’ve got bills to pay and bonuses to make. How do you expect us to do that when we’re shifting air fryers at a 40 per cent discount? Be reasonable.

“Those offers were genuine. You scorned them. And now you reap the whirlwind. Christmas is coming and we’re here to claim what’s rightfully ours, namely your hard-earned cash.

“What’s that? It seems to you prices have been inflated well beyond their original value? Yep. That’s just part of the F**k You, We’re Jacking The Price Right Up Tuesday fun. See you next year.”

Shopper Nikki Hollis said: “I am excited to take part in this fiscal event. I hope the shops play Christmas music.”

A fixture of British life for centuries, turning up on doorsteps with their age-old cry of ‘Shake, ma’am?’ served fresh from the foaming canisters on their backs, many feel the rising price of hotels, taxis and their staple product will kill their livelihoods.

Concerned salesman Martin Bishop said: “This could be it for us. The door-to-door milkshake vendor, of whom Shakespeare coined the phrase ‘the milk of human kindness’, wiped out.

“The UK was built on the backs of pioneering dairy-and-sugar entrepreneurs and this is how Rachel Reeves thanks us? At this rate even France will overtake us at flavoured-milk trading, which I never thought I’d live to see.”

Anxious merchant Susan Traherne said: “We’re such a fixture of British life, piping strawberry shake straight into the mouths of children, delighting communities, boosting tourism. Hard to imagine that could all vanish overnight.

“But make no mistake, we could soon be as distant a memory as the pub to-order while-you-wait sheep shearer or the open-plan office peanut salesman. Now so vanished that people don’t even remember they existed.

“So take a good, long look at us the next time we turn up at your door to show you the latest innovations in milk flavouring. It could well be the last.”