Gotta blog about this later. (The original is in German.) I was feeling bummed out about something at work, but this 3-part documentary “Poor Rich Germany” by the ZDF channel (Süddeutsche Fernsehen=South German TV) made me realize just how good I have it.
One episode is titled “When being self-employed turns to nightmare” (wenn Selbstaendigkeit zum Albtraum wird)
The show interviews a number of self-employed Germans, such as a flower shop owner, a hairdresser, the owners of a restaurant, and a tattoo parlor owner. They talk about being squeezed: on the one hand, there are skyrocketing energy and raw materials costs. On the other hand, either demand is dropping as people need money for food and energy instead of haircuts (so they go every 3 mo. instead of every 6 wks.), or the restaurant continues to be full but they cannot raise prices without driving customers away, and the owners end up paying themselves less than minimum wage so they can pay their employees.
Many of them exhausted their financial reserves during COVID or went into debt, and just as they were exiting that nightmare, the chickens of the “Energiewende” (the turn to ‘renewable’ in theory, in practice to dependence on Putin’s natural gas) came home to roost [the documentary isn’t saying that out loud].
You see, you can choose to bundle up and nearly freeze at home, but when you run a shop, hair saloon, or cafe, that isn’t an option. (In fact, people from the Lowlands have told me that some save on energy bills by going to a café and nursing one or two cups of coffee while working on their laptops, so they are warm and leave the heating off or on pilot lights in their house or apartment during the day, and just heat a little at night).
Then again, bizarrely enough, the owner of a tattoo parlor still finds plenty of hipsters with more money than sense willing to drop 500-600 euro for a service that is absolutely unnecessary.[*] I suspect that at least some of the immiseration of the middle class goes in tandem with enrichment of the doucheoisie.
Another episode in the same series, “When work isn’t enough to make a living”, discusses fulltime employed people who used to consider themselves middle class (e.g., a bus driver, flight attendant,…), but because of spiraling cost of living now have to take on second jobs just to put food on the table (as rent or mortgage plus energy costs eat up nearly their entire income) or turn to food banks. The show claims some 13 million Germans (including some 2 million self-employed, discussed in the above episode) are either in Armut (poverty) or Armutsgefaehrdet (threatened with poverty; freely, ‘teetering on the brink of poverty).
Of all the bad decisions Angela Merkel made, going along with the Energiewende was the worst.
I know some (semi-)retired people who just closed up the house for the winter and rented an AirBNB in Greece, southern Portugal,… — as it’s low tourist season, fairly cheap, lower cost of living to begin with, …
Still further South, here in Israel’s coastal plain, we have yet to turn on the heating (in practice for us, that means reverse-cycling our A/C) this year: energy peak season here is summer, not winter, and during summer our main renewable energy source, solar, actually produces most when everybody wants to run air conditioning. (This is a rare scenario where renewables production is somewhat in sync with peak consumption.)
Speaking of Israel, one of the peculiar fallouts of the Euro energy crisis is that the same Eurocrats usually eager to criticize Israel have toned down their rhetoric. You see, we have started exporting LNG to Europe via Egypt (pipeline going there, then their LNG terminal). The world is sure standing on its head…
[*] Aside from very strict prohibitions against tattoos in Judaism, I am old enough to remember tattoos meaning either “sailor” (no shortage of those where i grew up :)) or “underworld”.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
I am old enough to remember tattoos meaning either “sailor” (no shortage of those where i grew up :)) or “underworld”.
In Japan, for the most part, it still does.
ZDF = Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Back there were just a couple of channels this was number two
Thank you!
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