I NEED investors for a town centre Christmas shop I’m hoping to open within a couple of weeks.

It’s going to be a special shop that absorbs all the thick, inconsiderate people and allows the rest of us to visit other shops, buy stuff quickly and efficiently and then go home again.

Obviously I don’t have planning permission, but if recent cases in this neck of the woods are anything to go by it could well be Christmas 2014 before the authorities can shut me down.

I’m hoping most of my financial backing will come from other shops, who’ll be grateful for the extra revenue from a happier customer base.

My Christmas shop will have undercover staff who’ll wander the town centre looking gormless and annoying. As such people tend to be drawn to one another, they’ll soon build Pied Piper-style clusters of the gormless and annoying, which they’ll then lead to my shop.

The shop will sell an assortment of bright, shiny things randomly sourced from the cheapest wholesaler. They might be anything from novelty phone covers with obscene messages picked out in glitter to lumps of wood with flashing LED lights glued on. Anything that’s distracting enough to keep my customers wandering happily among the aisles for several hours, gibbering and pointing, will do just fine.

If the shop becomes too crowded, special flashing lights in the ceiling will be activated, causing the thick people to stop at random and gaze vacantly, just like they do every so often in real shops. However, unlike in real shops, they won’t be causing anybody inconvenience or frustration, or prompting ugly fantasies among ordinary folk involving the use of a chainsaw or a thermic lance.

The ceiling lights will continue to flash until enough customers have passed through the checkouts to make movement safe again. Obviously, this might take quite a while, as I anticipate each customer spending a good two hours in the checkout queue and at least another hour at the checkout itself.

That, of course, is because it won’t occur to them to have money or any other form of payment handy as they’re waiting for their purchases to be rung up, and they’ll react to the flashing of the sum on the cash register with the sort of shock and awe the rest of us would reserve for a talking dog or a bank boss with morals.

They’ll then have to dig through every bag and every pocket in several layers of clothing in search of payment.

At least one wall of my shop will be devoted to nothing but a huge row of cash machines, thereby eliminating yet another source of stress experienced by normal people while out Christmas shopping.

No more will those normal people stand, wretched and freezing, in a 100-yard cash machine queue while some gormless person causes a hold-up. All the gormless people will be safely inside my shop using my cash machines, which will feature moisture-proof keypads to repel drool and strawberry-flavoured screens.

If my shop is a success I might expand the idea into other ventures such as a special Christmas pub for the once-a-year brigade.