If Brexit becomes a permanent state of crisis, the UK will cease to attract inward investment.
On the other hand, if what we are currently seeing is just the teething pains of the new order combined with the post-pandemic-supply-chain-reboot, then I expect the UK will return to being a known quantity and more or less business as usual.
I feel like the UK was competitive when it was competing with European countries. Competing with countries in the EU? I just have no idea why anyone would invest in businesses there. It just feels like an inferior option, unless labor costs fall like a rock.
I think over time, the deals the UK gets will get worse and worse, not just on investment, but on everything.
It doesn't help that China still thinks of opium wars when the UK comes up, India things of the British Empire, and much of the rest of the world feels the same way. The UK was always respected, but never loved. If that respect goes away...
- stuff isn't packed as good as from the supplier - stuff has to be unpacked, checked, graded, re-packed, re-labelled and re-stored - stuff isn't delivered in bulk, it is delivered in small, more often tan not, single-unit quantities making goods receipt and in-bound ops more expensive
No idea if it is 20x, but it is considerably more expensive.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.