You cannot write comedy this good. You really can’t. If I tried to put this in a movie script, they would throw it in the trash for being too stupid. But here we are. This is real life.

Poundland, that shop where you go to buy cheap chocolate and batteries that die in twenty minutes, has officially hit rock bottom. And when I say rock bottom, I mean it in the most literal way possible. The company itself was sold for one pound. One single pound. A quid. A shiny coin you find stuck to a piece of old gum under a bus seat.

Think about that for a second. You walk into the store to buy a pack of sponges. Those sponges cost one pound. The entire company that owns the store, the trucks, the shelves, and the miserable fluorescent lights? Also one pound. The sponges in your hand are worth the exact same amount as the corporate entity you are standing in. If you buy two packs of sponges, you have technically spent double the value of the entire business empire.

It is hilarious. It is also deeply, deeply sad. Because while we laugh at the absurdity of a massive chain store being sold for the price of a vending machine soda, there are real consequences. And by consequences, I mean regular people getting kicked to the curb.

The new owners are a group from America called Gordon Brothers. They sound like a couple of guys who run a moving company, but they are actually "restructuring specialists." That is fancy talk for vultures. They swoop in when a company is dying, pick the meat off the bones, and fly away with whatever cash is left. And what is their big plan to save Poundland?

Firing people. Of course.

They are shutting down 149 stores. They are cutting 2,200 jobs. That is 2,200 people who have to go home and tell their families they don’t have a paycheck anymore because the shop that sells discount bleach couldn't figure out how to make money. They call this a "rescue shake-up." I love that. A rescue. If a lifeguard saves you from drowning by cutting off your arm, you don't call it a rescue. You call it a disaster. But in the corporate world, firing thousands of poor people is always called a "fix."

And why did this happen? Why did the empire of cheap junk fall apart? Because they forgot what they were.

The bosses at Poundland got greedy. They got arrogant. They looked at their store—a place named "Poundland"—and decided they didn't want to sell things for a pound anymore. They wanted to be fancy. They wanted to sell clothes. They tried to push a clothing brand called Pep & Co.

Let me be very clear here. Nobody, and I mean nobody, goes to Poundland for fashion. You go there because you are broke and need shampoo. You go there because you need a birthday card for a coworker you don't like. You do not go there to update your wardrobe. If you are buying your pants in the same aisle as the discount dog food, you have bigger problems than fashion.

But the suits in the boardroom didn't get that. They thought they could turn a bargain bin into a boutique. They switched suppliers. The clothes got worse. Nobody bought them. The sales crashed. It turns out, people only liked the store when it did exactly what the sign on the door said it would do.

Now, the new owners say they are going back to basics. They promised that 60% of their stuff is now priced at £1 again. Wow. Slow clap. Incredible genius at work here. A store called Poundland is going to sell things for a pound. Give these guys a Nobel Prize. It only took bankrupting the company and firing an army of workers to figure out the most obvious business plan in history.

This is the state of the world we live in. The people in charge are morons who chase trends until they crash the car. Then, when the car crashes, they blame the passengers and throw them out the window. The company gets sold for loose change to some American firm, and the cycle starts all over again.

The high street is dying. It is just a row of empty windows, vape shops, and charity bins. Poundland was supposed to be the one thing that survived because we are all too poor to shop anywhere else. But even the shop for poor people couldn't survive the stupidity of rich people.

So, go ahead. Walk into a Poundland while you still can. Buy a plastic bowl for a quid. Just remember that the plastic bowl has more value and more integrity than the people running the show.