Cash cow?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Cash cow?

Reader question:

Please explain “cash cow”, as in this sentence: “The car parking slots in the street are being treated as a cash cow.”

My comments:

This means the people who run and manage car parking spaces in the street are making a steady stream of income from them, as if they were cows that produce cash (money) on a daily basis.

Cows that produce cash?

Not directly, of course. They are metaphorically speaking milking cash out of these parking spaces as if they were cows.

The cows produce milk, which is freshly sold and earns the farmer ready cash everyday. These cows provide not only meat for the farmer but an additional amount of milk to be sold for cash every day. Hence, like the golden goose, it’s considered doubly valuable. And like the golden goose which lays golden eggs, you don’t want to kill or hurt your cash cow because you want it to continue to bring in an income on a daily basis.

In other words, you want to maintain the cash flow. You want to keep that stream of income. Stream of income, as in streams of milk, are an unbroken flow, hence the analogy.

All of this means, of course, that perhaps the parking slots in the streets of Beijing occupying what used to be bicycle lanes are going to stay. They’re not going to go away because they’re important to people who run and manage them. They provide a steady stream of income to them – I don’t even know who they are as the city never publishes facts regarding these – and they are going to keep them.