You may be forgiven for thinking this article will be about fruit given the title. But that is just where the thought started, of an interaction, between two people who each have something the other would like which would appear to be deemed of around equal value. A trade is to occur, a swap of the apple for the pear (or whatever item you have agreed upon), but for this I’m using fruit. And the point isn’t the item, or the people trading, it’s about the complicated system that has grown around that simple transaction and trade.

This article is about middlemen. Because when I gave it thought – and have done before in such articles as Opposition and Who’s that trip trapping on my bridge? it struck me as ridiculous that there are so many middlemen that have inserted themselves in between the transaction. Firstly, noted when the parking apps came in, I found it odd that there was a real need for an extra ten to twenty pence to be added to each transaction by the app provider, on top of the extra added by the car park owner or council, added to the percentage taken by the card provider. When you could (and did), just have a simple system of paying cash, parking and then leaving when you wanted, and were able to pass your ticket to someone else to use. They don’t want that, so are making sure even with cash tickets you have to put in your license plate. Greed really has taken over and it seems that many not only want a piece of the pie, but either want the same pie over and over, or once it has run out, they create a new pie that everyone is then forced to ‘eat’. So they can continue to get involved, interfere and find a way to bleed it dry, taint it and make sure it doesn’t change.

And that’s where it is now appearing to have slipped into extreme madness, where the desperation to have everything digital and monitored and bringing in pennies and pounds in a continuous stream of never-ending revenue. All so multiple businesses can get their hit from someone else’s hard work, time, effort, skill and customer base. And it must be addictive I don’t deny, making money while you sleep as they say, where you make money because someone else got off their arse and got to it. Same goes for governments, why would they ever want to stop the constant, never-ending flow of money being handed to them constantly with no accountability. Only a weak expectation of them to ‘do the right thing’ or do what they said they would with it. Like a gambler perhaps being given the weekly allowance, and told to go and get groceries despite the fact the previous times they were given that task, they went to the betting shop and spent it. Yet for some odd reason, the money keeps being handed over, and we are surprised when there are no groceries, and no money. That’s ok, we’ll just motivate ourselves to spend our time making more money for them, missing out on life, family, experiences and freedom, because they need some more. And the cycle continues.

Back to the apple, imagine you have it and the other person wants it – but there are three or four people who want to ‘take a bite’ before it gets to the purchaser. It would get less as it goes through each person, devaluing the product, and shifting the value of the product, to the process. So, the product becoming almost worthless, but the process of taking a bit, becomes very lucrative. And if you try to eliminate them in the equation, they come up with elaborate ways to get involved. Telling you the apple is poisoned and you can’t sell it, or ruining your crop so you don’t have any apples anymore, or starting rumours about your apples so that no-one wants to buy them anymore. How they get rid of competition, or tie people into their way and processes so that they are no longer able to cut out the middlemen.

And if you want to scale up the food analogy, just look at how farmers and the agriculture sector has had that happen, through rules, regulations and intricate processes, it’s almost not worth it anymore they say. But they still grow it, and people still need and want to buy it – yet aren’t allowed to, or can’t afford the twenty extra people wanting a bite of your dinner before it even gets to your table. If you ordered a meal, and the chef had a mouthful before he gave it to the waiter, and then the waiter has a mouthful before he put it down, you wouldn’t want it anymore, would you? And you had to leave some at the end for the pot washer so you aren’t even allowed to eat all of what is yours. Seems like madness doesn’t it? Reminds me of money now, you earn it and someone takes their bit, you spend it and someone else takes their bit, and before you know it, there are multiple obstacles, gatekeepers and middlemen between you and what should be just a normal everyday transaction…

(c) K Wicks