H/t to Daniel J. Mitchell for the link.
December 8, 2012
November 28, 2012
Is Ontario finally “grown up enough” for private wine stores?
In the National Post, David Lawrason talks about the push for changes to Ontario’s Prohibition-era laws regarding the sale of wine in private stores:
The Wine Council of Ontario has flipped the switch on a website called www.mywineshop.ca that allows citizens to create their own virtual wine shop. It is a very bold and clever marketing/lobbying idea. And it is the first time an industry association has initiated a public campaign aimed at creating private wine stores in the province. Gutsy stuff.
In less than a week it has painted an appetite-whetting tapestry of what privatization might look like in Ontario, complete with store themes, stock selections and locations across the province as designed by its citizens. And it is giving the public a very direct way to lobby their local MPPs for change.
One of the big reasons the Ontario wineries and wine writers fear pushing too hard for this modernization and liberalization of our drinking law is that the KGBO LCBO has a long history of retribution against dissenters:
The other theme is fear of LCBO retribution. (Talk about “the elephant in the room”). Even our braveheart John Szabo remarked at the end of his piece that “I hope I don’t get put on an (LCBO) interdiction list for writing this”. An importing agent replying to John’s article said he really wanted to talk about the issue ‘off the record’ as he was concerned that being put on an interdiction list would put him out of business.
This fear of the LCBO, whether justified or not, is another compelling reason to re-think the government monopoly. The fear shouldn’t exist within an otherwise free and democratic society; but it does. I have been writing on wine for over 25 years and during that time I have been involved in thousands of conversations with wineries, importers and consumers on shortcomings of the current system. Only once did an individual agree to be quoted.
When your livelihood depends on access to a product controlled by a monopoly, you dare not get on the wrong side of the powers-that-be controlling that monopoly. They may not break legs or leave horse’s heads in the beds of critics, but they can directly freeze the critics out of their profession. An excellent way to limit dissent. Just the hinted threat can be enough to make a would-be critic decide to toe the line and shut the hell up.
Comments Off on Is Ontario finally “grown up enough” for private wine stores?
November 27, 2012
Comparing Walmart to Costco
Megan McArdle explains why the facile comparison of the two big US retail firms does not make as much sense as people think:
One simply cannot have a discussion about Walmart’s wages without someone bringing up Costco. It seems to be de rigeur, like tipping your waiter, calling your mother on her birthday, and never starting your thank you notes with the words “Thank you”. So lets get it out of the way before the supper gong goes.
[. . .]
Costco has a more highly paid labor force — but that labor force also brings in a lot more money. Costco’s labor force, paid $19 an hour, brings in three times as much revenue as a Walmart workforce paid somewhere between 50-60% of that. (There’s a bit of messiness to all these calculations, because of course both firms have employees who don’t work in stores — but that’s the majority of their workforce, so I’m going to assume that the differences come out in the wash.)
This is not because Costco treats its workers better, and therefore gets fantastic productivity out of them, though this is what you would think if you listened to very sincere union activists on NPR. Rather, it’s because their business model is inherently higher-productivity. A typical Costco store has around 4,000 SKUs, most of which are stacked on pallets so that you can be your own stockboy. A Walmart has 140,000 SKUs, which have to be tediously sorted, replaced on shelves, reordered, delivered, and so forth. People tend to radically underestimate the costs imposed by complexity, because the management problems do not simply add up; they multiply.
One way to think about this is Thanksgiving dinner: how come you, who are capable of getting a meal on the table 364 nights of the year, suddenly find yourself burning things, forgetting the creamed onions in the microwave, and bringing the mashed potatoes to the table a half an hour late? Because when you’re cooking sixteen things instead of four, it is not the same as cooking four four-item meals. There are all sorts of complex interactions involving things like heating times and oven space, and adding more people to the problem, while probably necessary, itself multiplies the complexities.
Comments Off on Comparing Walmart to Costco
The missing generation
Chris Myrick posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on differences among the age cohorts regarding shopping habits, pointing out that his (and my) generation didn’t even show up in the graphic:
Hmmm. We can tell the shopping habits of folks from age 18 up to 34, then from 55 upwards. I wonder why the invisible folks aged 35-54 didn’t qualify? Perhaps because their behaviour would ruin the message the article is trying to push?
Comments Off on The missing generation
November 24, 2012
The disappointment of the WalMart protest
Megan McArdle says that the turnout for yesterday’s nation-wide protest outside WalMart stores fell well short of expectations, but that this shouldn’t be surprising:
There’s an irony to labor organizing: the best time to get workers fired up is during economic downturns, but this is probably the worst time to actually organize them. People are most interested in union actions when jobs are scarce and they feel economically insecure, but of course, that’s when they can ill-afford to take economic changes. Unions made big gains during the Great Depression, to be sure, but they had a host of new laws and a labor-activist FDR administration throwing heavy weight behind those efforts. Without that political help, it’s hard to see how unions could have made such big gains — and of course, arguably, the higher wages that FDR’s policies pushed for helped prolong the Great Depression.
Recessions are also a time when employers don’t necessarily have a lot of profits to give up. Walmart’s $446 billion of revenue last year was eye-popping, but its profit margins are far from fat — between 3% to 3.5%. If they cut that down by a percentage point — about what retailers like Costco and Macy’s have been bringing in — that would give each Walmart employee about $2850 a year, which is substantial but far from life-changing. Further wage improvements would have to come out of the pockets of Walmart’s extremely price conscious shoppers. Which might be difficult, given how many product categories Amazon is pushing into.
The other potential strategy is to mobilize those customers — to cost Walmart business unless they up their wage-and-benefit game. But the Black Friday bargain hunters apparently simply pushed past the scattered protests in search of cheap flat-screen televisions — and the progressives who seem most on fire about this campaign are not really very likely to be Walmart shoppers. Which could be a metaphor for the whole US labor movement.
Comments Off on The disappointment of the WalMart protest
November 15, 2012
Fisking the Williams-Sonoma catalog
Drew Magary made a critical mistake once, paying for an overpriced Williams-Sonoma cheese grater with a credit card, thus ending up with yet another glossy catalog landing in the mailbox every year. “Every holiday season, my mail slot gets bukkake’d with monstrous catalogs packed with shit I would never, ever buy, and the W-S catalog stands out among them.”
Inspired by the offerings of the Williams Sonoma catalog, Drew responds to some of the juiciest items:
Item #02-4381232 Acorn Twine Holder
Williams-Sonoma says: “Polished alderwood with 76 yards of linen twine. Made in Italy.”
Price: $26
Notes from Drew: Oh, thank God! Thanksgiving was mere weeks away and I was like OH FUCK, WE’RE OUT OF TWINE. AND WE HAVE NO PLACE TO DISPENSE SAID TWINE. Sure, any asshole can go to the store and buy a roll of cooking string for half a penny and keep that twine in a drawer for the one time per year someone in the house has to tie up a raw turkey only to fail miserably and get salmonella deep inside his palms for years and years. But I want CLASSY twine, you know? I want my twine to say something about ME.
[. . .]
Item #02-741009 Callie’s Charleston Biscuits
Williams-Sonoma says: “Flaky, buttery, and made by hand by celebrated caterer Callie White.”
Price: $72 (set of 24)
Notes from Drew: That’s $72 dollars for biscuits. At Popeye’s, the biscuit comes free with your order. At Williams-Sonoma, it costs you the rough equivalent of your phone bill. How good could these biscuits possibly be? There’s a threshold past which biscuits cannot improve. Even the best goddamn biscuit in the world isn’t $72 better than a Popeye’s biscuit. Unless that biscuit can make you teleport.
And what kills me is that there are clearly people out there who have shitloads of money and NO cooking skills who order this shit. Who are these people? How are there so many of them that Williams-Sonoma can sustain its business model? Are we all just racking up massive biscuit debts that will soon break the economy? I imagine that 60 percent of Williams-Sonoma’s business come from a group of six Persian oil barons, who buy everything in every catalog five times over every year for no good reason at all. Seventy-two-dollar biscuits. WHAT THE FUCK.
[. . .]
Item #02-410423 Assumption Abbey Fruitcake
Williams-Sonoma says: “Baked by trappist monks at a monastery in the Missouri Ozarks. Order early. Supply is limited.”
Price: $39.95
Notes from Drew: Everything about that sales copy just blew my skull. There are trappist monks in the Ozarks? Do they brew artisanal meth? I don’t trust fruitcake to begin with. I sure as shit am not trusting fruitcake that comes from a redneck friar. They’ll swap out uppers for candied fruit. And yet, supply is limited. Apparently, the market for $40 Ozark fruitcake is ENORMOUS. White women from Bridgehampton ALL THE WAY to Westhampton rely on the monks to deliver their holiday fruitcake every year. Ina Garten’s ADORABLE HUSBAND JEFFREY WHO MAKES A LOT OF MONEY loves the sight of a fine white-trash-monk fruitcake any time he comes home. TIE IT UP WITH THE TWINE!
H/T to John Kovalic for the link.
Comments Off on Fisking the Williams-Sonoma catalog
August 2, 2012
The real reason behind the war on the humble plastic bag
Tom Bailey explains that the reasons we’ve been given for the renewed attacks on plastic bags are not the real reason for the ongoing struggle:
Individually, a plastic bag weighs about eight grams. In total, we use about 10 billion of them a year, adding up to around 80,000 tonnes of plastic bags. A large number, perhaps, but not when compared with total municipal waste. The total amount of household waste produced each year is 29.6million tonnes. This means that plastic bags make up a mere 0.27 per cent of what we all throw away every year. This percentage would become even smaller if we were to include commercial and industrial waste in our calculations.
The total amount of oil used to produce plastic bags is also exaggerated, considering that most plastic bags are made using naphtha, a part of crude oil that isn’t used for much else and would probably be burnt away otherwise.
So what’s going on here? Why the panic about a simple little bag? The assault on plastic bags is really an assault on consumerism. There is a prevailing view among the green and mighty that consumerism is bad. It is portrayed as being a modern-day vice, devoid of meaning, something which atomises society, corrupting us through crude materialism and distracting us from more important issues.
Plastic bags are an outward reflection of the ease with which people can buy goods and take them home. People now have the disposable income to enter a shop unexpectedly and buy a load of stuff, and plastic bags mean they can rest assured they they will have the means to carry their purchases. How often do people returning home from work decide, on a whim, to make a quick stop at Tesco Express to buy a few items of food? How frequently, perhaps on a journey past Oxford Street, are we drawn into a sale by a piece of attractive clobber? Such nonchalant consumption would be made more difficult, perhaps more expensive, without shops’ provision of handy, free plastic bags.
I guess I must be a puppet of “Big Plastic”, as I’ve posted about this issue a few times already.
June 8, 2012
Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart
Terence Corcoran is too kind in his discussion of Toronto’s new ban on plastic bags:
In star-struck liberal green Los Angeles, it took a full-court press by environmental groups, major propaganda efforts, endorsement by the roll-over editorialists at the Los Angeles Times, and deployment of Hollywood stars, such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Peter Fonda, to work up the political steam needed to prompt L.A.’s city council to vote last month to ban plastic bags.
In starless Toronto, all it took was a bunch of dumb city councillors who suddenly decided — seemingly out of the blue — to stage a surprise vote.
“Ban the bags,” somebody said. “Good idea. Let’s vote!” Passed: 27 to 17.
No study, no research, no public review, no thought, no concept and no brains. What’s the environmental and fiscal impact of the ban? Nobody knows, although many people say the cost to both the city and the environment will be greater than the cost of using plastic bags.
As I think Adrian MacNair mentioned, one of the most likely outcomes is that people will end up buying less. It’s those little impulse buys that will be curtailed the most, as many folks — especially tourists — won’t have realized they need to bring their own carry bags.
Comments Off on Toronto City Council’s latest collective brain-fart
February 20, 2011
Tunnelling man desperate for coffee
An amusing story from Yolk Region News:
Duane Oppenheimer, 59 1/2, of Newmarket was charged with mischief and unlawful excavation on Wednesday evening, after cleaning staff at Upper Canada Mall discovered a large rectangular crack in a utility closet floor. The crack turned out to be a hatch leading to Oppenheimer’s tunnel, a 200-metre subterranean passageway that extended under the mall’s south parking lot and continued below Davis Drive into an adjacent subdivision where it emerged inside the Oppenheimer’s garage.
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, who said “Who knew that people in Newmarket were so industrious?”.
Comments Off on Tunnelling man desperate for coffee
November 26, 2010
Canadian retailers are “furious” at customers for looking to the US for cheaper prices
A brief filler piece on the Canadian Press newswire explains only part of the reason so many Canadian shoppers are headed south to do their Christmas shopping this year:
This is Black Friday in the U.S., but many Canadian retailers are a furious red at the thought of consumers heading south for bargains.
The Retail Council of Canada says there is a long list of reasons to shop north of the border.
It says retailers are a vital part of any community’s economy and it employs 10 per cent of the workforce.
It also reminds consumers that Canadian taxes — which cause much of the traffic south — help pay for health care and education.
The higher taxes are certainly a big part of the explanation, but even if you control for tax, Canadian prices are generally higher than their US counterparts. For example, a paperback I picked up at random from our coffee table (published quite recently) has a price of $7.99 on it. If you’re an American, that is. Canadians pay $10.99. The Canadian dollar is around US$0.98.
Nice little markup, eh? Add the 13% Hack-and-Slash Tax on top of that, and you know exactly why thousands of Canadians are willing to put up with long lines at the border to do their shopping in the States.
December 22, 2009
Anglicans now allowed to shoplift
There’s updating your church to appeal to modern attitudes, and then there’s this:
Thou shall steal after all! Holy row greets fatherly advice from York vicar
Church of England priest Tim Jones preaches it’s OK to shoplift, though it’s best from a big retail company not family businessIn issuing the 10 commandments to Moses atop Mount Sinai, God was pretty unequivocal: “Thou shalt not steal.”
However, there’s good news for anyone whose passion for pilfering has hitherto been tempered by the eighth commandment: according to one Church of England vicar, we can steal after all.
Father Tim Jones, the parish priest of St Lawrence and St Hilda in York, told his congregation on Sunday that certain vulnerable people face difficult situations.
“My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift,” he said. “I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.”
Well, that pretty much seals it, doesn’t it? Any other commandments we can dispense with — with the blessings of the Church of England?
August 22, 2009
US daytrips to Canada drop significantly
Megan McArdle has an interesting post about the precipitous drop in US visits to Canada:
Kevin Drum is puzzled:
Well, here’s today’s [chart]: day trips to Canada are down. Way down. It’s not clear why, either. The accompanying story blames it mostly on new passport rules, along with “other factors, including the recession and the higher Canadian dollar.” But that doesn’t really hold water. The downward spike from May to June might be due to new passport rules, but the chart makes clear that travel has been steadily decreasing ever since it recovered from 9/11 in early 2002. Obviously passport rules have nothing to do with this 7-year trend, and neither does the recession or the strength of the Canadian dollar.
Megan points out that the strengthening Canadian dollar does actually account for much of the change, with the passport requirement only being the final nail in the coffin. Security theatre, as pointed out in the comments, probably accounts for some of the decline as well.
The comment thread is quite interesting, as both facts and “facts” get deployed to support pre-existing positions. Do read through them.
I’m finding this an interesting discussion, as I’m headed the other way tomorrow . . . I’m taking a week-long course near Pittsburgh. I remember the days of the cheap Canadian dollar, when we used to use terms like “Canadian Peso” or “TundraMicroBuck”, and I don’t particularly miss them. I don’t know if I’ll be doing much shopping while I’m in Pennsylvania, but the price differences are much smaller than they were the last time I was in the states.
Comments Off on US daytrips to Canada drop significantly
August 17, 2009
QotD: The perils of being a retail customer
Of course, it’s entirely possible I was simply bored. Numbingly bored after meetings with financial planners over the preceding two days and being forced to repeatedly use the, impossibly awkward to enunciate, word arithmetic to correct suggestions from across the table that mathematics was in some way directly relevant to my cash flow model questions which arise when considering any investment model strategy. Then again, maybe I just wanted to be recklessly adolescent in that rather staid, middle aged, considered manner one does when one throws their Infinity VISA card at the clerk who a moment ago was convinced you were invisible and who then has to dispel his anxiety over whether or not you are going to hit him up for spare change or a smoke, maybe with an offer to squeegee his cash register monitor or, in exchange for a 10% discount, offer to blow him over there behind the flat panel 1080p display.
Such moments, me the cash — them the goods, remind me why I hate being a consumer. “Hey, Buddy! It’s money. My money. Take it. Take it!” You’d think, by now, Sony would know that the only reasonable outcome to expect from hanging a crisp white shirt and Windsor knot tied tie on a monkey is only slightly better than, well, a perhaps well dressed monkey dressed well. “Buddy! Wake up. Can’t you stop grinding that organ for one second?” But, even dressed up, it’s just a monkey which can’t seem to speak intelligently to confirm information and facts I’ve already fully digested from online product reviews and support documents. “Can’t we skip a beat to do things a little different this time? How about you agree to take your hand off your organ long enough to take my money. That’s it, Buddy. A little closer, now. Sorry?” What’s my monkey up to now? “Of course I don’t want to buy an extended monkey warranty. Do I look totally bananas to you?” I’m more certain than ever before the monkeys were different when I was young. “Hey! Don’t lick my credit card. Stop that.” Stupid monkey. “And I expect you to wash it before handing it back to me.”
Dark Water Muse, “The Stupid Monkey (or ‘Why it sucks to be a consumer’)”, Dark Water Musings, 2009-08-09
Comments Off on QotD: The perils of being a retail customer
