Oh, dear, oh, dear—evidently the House of Windsor’s house
is not at all in order. Queen Elizabeth II has overspent on household
maintenance, and she’s down to her last £1MM in reserves. (Question: Couldn’t
she just check between the sofa cushions? Gotta be a few million quid there—she
must have a lotta sofas, no?)
Horrors!
And even with the profligacy, royal residences are said
to be in poor condition, and HM needs more dosh to attend to the deficiencies.
The parliamentary report recommends that the Queen (well,
her minions, really) should do
more in the way of cost-cutting—by which they actually mean “lay off employees”,
keeping the public sector (well, I dunno—is the Royal Household considered “public”?
Oh, never mind) in line with private sector strategies of not bothering with
improvements or innovations when you can just sack the staff.
It actually used the phrase “do more with less”, which
has to eat the Royal Lunch.
There’s also a recommendation
to increase revenues, and one suggestion was that Buckingham Palace should be opened to more paying visitors
during times when HM is not in residence.
Well, let an American
product manager who has no qualms about thinking outside the box propose they
go a couple of steps further. I’m talking Bucks House B&B. This is not even
an untried idea—the French have done it with one of the sub-palaces at Versailles.
Of course, they’re probably
serving better food, but still.
Really—there are all kinds
of tourists with more money than brains who’d pay premium prices to spend a
night at the palace and shoot out selfies at a rate of knots. And I’m sure
there are plenty of spare bedrooms that could be dusted off and hawked on hotels.com or Room 77.
Although—I’m wondering how many
of the bedrooms have en-suite bathrooms? How would said tourists feel about
paying £700 per night for a single bed and a loo down the corridor shared with
yahoos from Utah, Uganda and Uzbekistan?
Then there’s the breakfast
of cornflakes and cold toast under the beady stare of HM’s serving staff.
(Well, more likely underemployed yoofs brought in on zero-hour contracts and
tricked out in livery to look like the real thing. But they’ll be trained to
get the snoot effect down.) What the hell—charge extra if they want an actual meal—it’s
the palace, for heaven’s sakes; you could get away with £65 for the full
English, including VAT.
Yeah, I know—they’d have to worry about folks nicking the
towels or the spoons. Although, look—you’ve got their credit card details; just
tack on £35 per spoon and £100 per towel. You can really revenue-spin the hell out
of this. And you’d keep the linen and cutlery factories going, so a bonus on
the employment front.
(Unless, of course said factories are in Bangladesh. Um.)
Okay—we do have to work out some details, including
shaping HM’s head about the concept of sharing. It seems she was pretty cheesed
off by police on patrol eating
the palace peanuts. And we know this because she marked the level in the bowls of nuts around the place (yes, with
her own royal hands and an imperial Magic Marker) and then let it be known that
she was not amused.
But look—package up said peanuts in two-ounce packets
stamped “By Appointment to the Queen” and sell ‘em for £5 a pop. It’s all good.
And, Windsors—you’re welcome.
2 comments:
Oh, this is Xie at her cheek-tongued best!
B&B in the Palace and prepackaged peanuts -- tacky but desperate times call for desperate measures.
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