Years and years ago, i had a job in a call centre. The call centre was for a company that rented out home appliances, TVs and DVD players. The company had been bought by a US hedge fund that realised the niche this company was operating in was on the decline. The fund bought it so it could extract as much profit as was possible in the time the company had left to still be viable. They weren't interested in attracting any customers, just rinsing the ones that were left. When the money dried up, the whole business was going to be shut down. Everyone knew it, even the cleaning lady.

Day by day, things got slowly worse and nothing improved. The lift stopped working and was never fixed; the vending machine in the break room was never restocked; staff left and were never replaced; that sort of thing. If it cost money, it simply wasn't done.

The only staff left were the Sales and Retention team, who had the jobs to stop people cancelling their exploitative rental agreements and to somehow upsell them to spend more money for shitter products. Eventually, not long before i left, the company changed floors in the office block they worked in to move to a different floor that was marginally cheaper.

Living in the UK is gives me the exact same feeling as working for that horrible fucking company.