Life without BID (1) – firstly, don’t fall for BID emotional blackmail!
When the business plan eventually comes out Minehead BID will be laying on thick emotional blackmail to try and get businesses to vote yes, creating fear of missing out (FOMO) by making a big point of saying the town will lose X Y Z, we need BID to compete with other towns, and generally try to make you think that business in Minehead is going to end without BID! There’s likely to be a section in the business plan dedicated to this, just look for it.
The FOMO has already started, Karen’s been walking around town spreading it and the Free Press article PR line showed us it:
“Maybe the extra 150 hanging baskets and planters that BID provided helped. This sort of thing COULD be lost if BID is voted out.”
It is interesting to note that the BID Chair used the words ‘could’ instead of ‘will’, nice admission that it's not guaranteed we will lose everything!
So, the question to ask yourself is not what the alternative BID is, that’s the psychological blackmail line they want you to think about, but instead simply ask yourself what will life without BID be like for your business?
After paying it for 5 years and seeing what you’ve got from BID so far, if you see life as no different without BID then you may as well vote no and keep your hard-earned cash in your pocket.
Because of BID emotional blackmail, naturally some people are asking what the alternative to BID is, but again, that’s not the question to ask yourself, the right question is whether your business and Minehead would miss BID. Let’s remember that in the c1000 year history of Minehead, BID has only been here 5 years, let’s look at it as an experiment, it’s not popular, not worked, and we can get along just fine without it!
But to reassure undecided voters about life without BID so you don’t succumb to BID emotional blackmail, this is the first of several posts on this subject because there’s just to much to write and show you in one post about thriving without BID, including alternatives if people still want to use that word.
#VoteNO
n.b. This is just one post talking about life without BID, so please also read the other posts aswell to get a complete picture.