Photo Finishing: Maybe Grocery Stores Should Get Out

The Canadian Loblaw grocery group operates stores under at least ten banners that I am aware of, and many of their larger ones include a photo finishing kiosk.

Today we went to the one in our area — Your Independent Grocer or “The Yig” as locals call it, to pick up a small order of personal photos.

I paid cash, which is unusual for me; and when I got home, I discovered I was holding pictures that in fact were our pictures, but they were an order the company had lost back in mid-July and subsequently reprinted.

We phoned to (a) report the error and (b) ensure that our correct order was indeed still there.    We said we would drive back to pick up the right pictures and get a $3.11 refund on the wrong ones since the current order is smaller.

No can do.

There are over 40 people working on the afternoon shift at that grocery store, but the manager on duty, who is fully responsible for those 40 staff members and an appropriately large facility does not have the authority to issue to issue a $3 refund.

The refund and the pickup of our correct pictures now has to wait until Tuesday, since Monday is a holiday in Canada.

The envelope clearly indicates that the pictures were ordered in July and the cash receipt clearly indicates that it’s that order that I just paid for.

But they can’t refund $3.

And they want my continued grocery business.

Okay, they can have it.   If they promise to get out of the photography business.

Advertising Flyers: Is Saying “NO” The Answer?

A friend sent me a link to the “Red Dot Campaign” this week.   It’s a program whereby householders can refuse to accept 3rd class mail or “junk mail” or advertising distributed to mailboxes by private companies.   The idea is to save the environment.

Here’s how I responded:

I have mixed feelings on this.   I do want to know what products and services my local merchants are offering; besides I AM a local merchant.  One problem is the thickness and frequency of some of the pieces.

Last Christmas Canadian Tire ran a 48 page non-recyclable — despite what they tell you — flyer which of course was only valid for one week.   Their flyer the next week was 32 pages.    That’s far too many trees giving their lives.

The IGA grocery stores are the worst among food merchants.   16-page flyers are common.   It’s like every single SKU they sell is on sale every single week.

Two weeks ago we encountered a new problem.   Trying to be environmentally responsible, we’re reading flyers online and noticed that one of the chains was only posting the first six pages of what we knew to be an eight-page flyer.   The cutoff occurred in the middle of a two-page spread that had writing spanning both pages.   Ooops!    But then we discovered a couple of the other chains are not posting their health-and-drug specials.   Those pages do not appear because of competition fears.

And discount chain Giant Tiger refused to allow any of the flyer-aggregators to re-post their flyer.   The ones that do are threatened with lawsuits.    GT is posting it themselves currently, but only select pages.

But another problem is the limited availability of the items advertised.   A franchisee for Radio Shack once told me that each location only receives two units of every advertised item.   The flyer is used only to lure people into the store.    They have no intention of selling large quantities of the items advertised.

A stock clerk for Food Basics also explained an out-of-stock situation on a special on cheese last week:  “They only send us cheddar, even though there are several varieties covered under the terms of the sale.   We might get a box or two of the other flavors, but the rest of the skid is entirely cheddar.”

Another problem is the very unusually high number of misprints.   Wal-Mart seems to run at least half a dozen corrections in the course of a week.   If they had this big a problem with their flyer production, they would have fixed it by now.    Instead the flyers are allowed to go out with incorrect information, while the truth is buried in very small single-column (classified size) adverts in the main body of the paper, often a day later.

The solution?  Set limits on the number of pages each advertiser can send out in one year in “insert” form, but offer an extension if they choose to run display ads in the actual newspapers carrying the flyer; thus supporting the Canadian newspaper industry more directly by allowing them — because of their advert-to-editorial ratios — to print more information, news and features.

Sports Tickets: Washington Redskins Sue 72-year-old Woman

Redskins:  You never had a better fan than hard-working, still-working real estate agent Pat Hill.   But times are tough and she just couldn’t afford her long-term contract for seats.   And you had thousands of people willing to pick up her contract so that you could let her off the hook.   Which is what other sports teams do in a situation like this one.

But you didn’t.   You sued her.  A judge awarded you $66,000.   Well-played.  Not.

Everyone else:  Read the story at Canadian Jordan Cooper’s blog.

Restaurants: Keep Your Germs to Yourself

Today we visited one of the few “all you can eat” places I know that has, rather than an Oriental theme, an Italian one.

Located just north of Toronto, Ontario; Frankie Tomatoes is a treat both visually and gastronomically, and is reasonably priced by Toronto standards.

Of course, in a buffet situation, one is continually in physical contact with serving spoons, lifters and tongs that are being used by other people, so the guy who was walking around in a major sneezing fit — followed repeatedly by rubbing his hands on his nose — was rather obvious.

And while race doesn’t matter in this story, I do believe that he was of Oriental extraction, so this may have simply been sabotage by a group of the aforementioned other “all you can eat” places.  OK, I’m kidding.   Sort of.

Note to self:  At the earliest mention of the fall/winter onslaught of H1N1 (Swine Flu) avoid this type of place like the plaugue.    (Ha Ha!  Like the plague.  Get it? )   If any one particular kind of restaurant is a breeding ground for the rapid spread of germs throughout the larger community, this is the one.

Note to everyone:  DON’T GO to this type of place if you’re sick.   Stay home.   Order take out.

When Your Rights are Trampled

This is probably a bit outside the scope of this blog, but in my quest for a good night’s sleep or the ‘peaceful enjoyment’ of my property, I’m always amazed at how my perceived rights are walked on by others.   Here’s what I mean.

• If you’re a non smoker, and somebody smokes in your vicinity, your fresh air vanishes, but you can’t retaliate by walking into a smoky bar or workplace and fill it with fresh air.
• If you like peace and quiet, and your neighbors keep holding late night parties, your peace vanishes, but you can’t retaliate by doing some action which fills their noisy space with silence.
• If your neighbor has ten solar lights, three motion lights and a couple of lampposts, and you prefer things to be dark at night, you can’t retaliate by aiming darkness at their lighted property.
• If you suffer from allergies or asthma and you’ve asked your neighbors to refrain from pesticide spraying or campfires, there’s no ‘opposite’ that you can inflict on them or use to counteract the effects you’re suffering.
• If your neighbors insist on turning their front yard into an auto body and repair shop, no matter how nicely treed and aesthetically pleasing you make your own front lawn, it won’t counteract the fact that it’s the front of their house that’s in your field of vision.

Basically, the bad guys, the selfish guys, win every time.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

CBC News covers Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell in this report on their website.   Click anywhere within the graphic below to read the whole piece:

Hotels: Howard Johnson’s; Woodstock, NB

We were arriving from Maine into Canada quite late, plus you lose an hour when you cross into the Atlantic Daylight Time zone.    So it seemed a good idea to stop at the tourist info center and get them to book us into a room.

The name Howard Johnson’s has a certain nostalgia to it; their motor lodges were once synonymous with travel in the U.S.    How bad could it be?

The answer is: Very bad.

The lobby was spacious and modern, and combined with the outward appearance of the building;, we fell hook, line and sinker for a third-world motel that we could have avoided simply by asking to see the room.

It turned out that the outward appearance of the motel resulted from taking a very old building and covering it in fresh aluminum siding.   Once inside, the door frames, the fixtures, the walls and the large mysterious wooden ‘box’ in one corner denoted something from the 1960s at the very latest.

Furthermore, the window of the motel faced out on the back of the main office building, also clad in a blinding white siding.    It was like staring out the window at a large trailer with no windows.

The wireless internet was mostly non-existent.    There wasn’t enough light to read a book by.   The indoor swimming pool was packed with a kids baseball team; we never did get to use it.    So if we couldn’t swim in the pool, we thought we’d use the nearby pool table.    We had to share a cue.    Apparently “the short one” was broken.  I doubt all the billiard balls were their, either.

When we tried to go to sleep, we realized there was no soundproofing between us and the people in the room next door.    Since they were still up, we stayed up.    And when they had wake-up sex the next morning, we heard more than we wanted to.     Fortunately, on the other side of the room, the dog staying with that family only barked twice.    The loud conversation outside the door at 5:00 AM ruined what little sleep I was getting.

Taking a shower the next morning was a bit of an experience since the shower controls were mounted upsidedown.   A miscalculation would have resulted in scalding, since the hot water tank was the one thing in the building that was working well.

The breakfast the next morning was served in what was the bar in this motel’s previous incarnation.   The air-conditioning couldn’t keep up with the sunshine streaming through the window, so we roasted.  The woman attending to the breakfast patrons couldn’t keep up with the items that kept running out.   Not really her fault, she was doing her best under the conditions in which she was forced to work.   So, all things considered, the worm-hole in the apple we picked up seemed to fit the bigger picture.

But it would be unfair if I didn’t mention that the entire city of Woodstock, NB is somewhat lacking when it comes to anything resembling quality hospitality.    We walked out of three restaurants before settling for a fourth; though the second one might have worked if they had offered more than three menu choices.    Apparently it varies each day.

Woodstock is the first town Americans see when entering Canada from Maine.   Hopefully they don’t stop there.   As someone born in Canada, it was completely embarrassing from beginning to end.  We should have stayed in Houlton, ME that night.

In any case, always ask to see the room when you travel in Canada.

Note:  In fairness, the Best Western chain has invested heavily in West New Brunswick, and seems determined to “raise the bar” when it comes to accommodation.   We’d pay the extra $$ next time; except there won’t be a next time.

Gas Prices: A New Concept

I don’t know of any other product that bounces around in terms of price, as does the cost of gasoline (or as you say in Europe,  petrol.)   Can you imagine showing up at the post office and finding the cost of mailing a letter fluctuates radically from day to day?

Wednesday, July 1st was the Canadian equivalent of the 4th of July in the U.S., and the price went up 10 cents per litre (or, U.S., liter) the day before the holiday — that’s like a 40 cent per gallon increase for you Americans — and then went down eight cents the next day after the holiday.

So I’m thinking, if you go to a Chinese buffet they have a lunch price of $7.99, but you can pay as a high as $15.99 (around here, anyway) for dinner on Saturdays and Sundays.  We know that movies are cheap on Tuesdays, and there’s a higher price on the weekend.   We know the hair salon charges more on Fridays.    So since we know the gas companies are going to gouge us on weekends and holidays, why not make it official?

Why not post the weekday price, the weekend price and the holiday price?   It’s not like there will be huge lineups when the price is low — we already know it’s going up on those occasions.

But it would be an admission on their part of exactly what they are doing.

Do Not Call List? We Need a “Do Not Mail” List

It’s not perfect, but the Do Not Call list in both the U.S. and Canada is helping to end the constant, dinnertime interruptions from telemarketers.

Now it’s time to move to the next level.    North Americans are inundated with junk mail.   It’s an environmental disgrace, and there ought to be restrictions as to the size and frequency of flyers, brochures and circulars.

But addressed junk mail is a greater problem, because it is a more expensive form of marketing.    Those marketing costs are then passed on to the consumer.

In Canada, the chief offender is Bell Canada.    Because they have a huge customer base, they can simply pass those costs on to its customers.   They may lose customers, but because it’s a utility, customers aren’t going to stop buying the service from someone. In a way, it’s like a tax, a tax burden that especially affects the poor.

Basically, Bell Canada can do anything it damn well pleases. Where we live, that means getting at least one mailing piece advertising satellite, internet, mobile phone and land line phone — plus various combinations of same — approximately every 3-4 days that there is mail delivered.    Some weeks we get more, and some days we get more than one mailing piece from them.

All of this driving up the costs of phone service, as well as costs to other phone service providers who receive wholesale services from Bell’s networks.

This has got to stop. You need to tell them, mark “return to sender” on their mailing pieces, and stop buying their products. For the sake of the environment. For the sake of the poor, who are bearing the indirect marketing costs. For the sake of people who already have enough to deal with in their daily mail delivery. For the sake of common sense.

Hotels Part Five: Freebies and Fun

You know it’s a special moment when the man in the family notices the soap in the hotel.   Guys don’t care about soap, or how it smells.    Except for Irish Spring.   Guys are allowed to extol that one because it’s a “man’s soap.”

So at risk to my masculinity, I have to say that at a stop a few years back at LaQuinta (I think) I couldn’t help but notice the soap was  a little nicer than what one normally receives.    As luck would have it, there was a manufacturer credit given to Dial Soap.   A quick call or e-mail and I would have this product in our home; or at least know where to purchase.

It was not to be.   The product they give out in hotels is manufactured entirely for the hospitality industry.   There is no corresponding product sold at retail.

Okay.   Let’s think about this.   You’ve got an opportunity to place a product sample in every hotel room.   You’ve got tourists — people with much disposable income — who are indeed going to use your product, and use it at a time where every vacation memory will be indellibly etched in memory.   And — this is the really big one — the hotel chain is willing to pay you to give out that product sample.

And then, you fumble the ball badly by not having that product, or anything like it, available through the retail system.    I couldn’t believe it.

But then I got thinking.  If the Dial Soap people don’t want to it right, perhaps there are other manufacturers — not necessarily just of health and beauty aid products — who would be willing to place product samples in hotel rooms.

What if each chain had a different “gift basket” and you knew when you checked in that it was waiting for you (so local operators and housekeepers couldn’t skim off the samples for their families) and these were relatively the same across each chain, with a few regional disparities to make it interesting?

What if some of the money spent on advertising and some of the product samples that already exist were diverted to the hotel/motel industry and its customers?   What if the products in a single-bed room were different than the products in a double room or suite that rents to families?

Best of all, what if it worked?   What if instead of paying for supplies, hotels and motels found that companies were so willing to get what the entertainment industry calls “product placement,” that they were willing to pay them a small fee to see that a “travel basket” contained their products?   And — dare I dream this — the hotels and motels passed some of the savings on to the weary traveler?

Besides, the freebies would make travel a lot more fun.    I should want to return that hotel the next time around.

Pictured:  One of dozens of personal collections of hotel soap photographed and posted to the internet.   Okay…  Personally I use the soap; I have enough collections of other things.    This one is a classic, though.

Hotels Part Four: Days Inn

In writing this series of Hotel posts, I really felt that Days Inn deserved its own separate piece.

The problem here is one of branding.    There are three different Days Inn out there–

• the new modern ones built in the last few years
• the older but still nice downtown ones
• the ones that the chain should be ashamed to have wear their name

–and if you’re planning ahead or booking ahead, you don’t necessarily know what kind you’re getting until you arrive.

In Nashville, TN; someone had been shot at our motel the night before.   Of course we learned that elsewhere.   The pool was full of cigarette butts.   The “guests” (term used loosely) would sit outside and flick their cigarettes into the pool from the second floor balcony.

We were constantly being asked to move our car because they were paving the parking lot, which means we had to be careful not to track tar into our car.   (They should have shut down for the latter, if not the other reasons.)

I should add that there was no indication that this was a dangerous area; in fact it was just a few miles from the Opryland Hotel, which goes for $229 a night.

The Days Inn on I-77 in Charlotte, NC more recently was a real piece of work.   The door to our room didn’t remotely fit the frame.   Whereas we stuffed towels into the door at the Courtyard Inn, we would be stuffing blankets and bedspreads into this one to close the gap, especially considering it was an outside hallway with the temperature forecast to go below freezing.

The phone didn’t work.   I could phone the front desk, but not get an outside line.   I had a phone call that was time sensitive that I had to make.   They replaced the phone set, but with the same result:  Internal calls, yes; outside line, no.    So I was told I could use the phone in the lobby.    Except there was no phone in the lobby, just the switchboard handset.    They put an incoming call on hold and passed me the handset.    No go.   I was facing a 32-number credit card access and at least a ten minute conversation.   They did not understand this.   I had to go to the 7-11 across the road, in the rain, and in the cold to make a phone call.    In a not nice neighborhood.

The coat rack was falling off the wall.    One of the electrical outlets had been partially covered over by a wall.  (See photograph.)  Finally, my wife was handed a $5 bill — hush money — as we were moved to another room across from a noisy staircase.    But still better than what we originally were given.

When you see a warning sign like the one in the lobby (see photograph), saying you can’t get your money back after 20 minutes, you know you’re in trouble.     In future, we just won’t take a chance on Days Inn no matter which of the three formats is presented.

Because any chain that would allow their name to be attached to this sort of nonsense isn’t worth of existing, let alone having our business.

BTW, I do feel sorry for the staff caught in the middle in these situations.   The girl who served us, obviously a recent arrival in the USA from somewhere else, admitted she had no experience at all being a guest in such a facility.   She had no idea how things are supposed to work.   That is such a telling, critical factor.

Hotels Part Three: The Law of Diminishing Returns

I don’t know why this is true, but the more you pay to spend the night in a hotel, the less you receive.

On our trip to Florida two years ago, we stayed at AmeriSuites.  (Are they still around?)   The room they gave us was an absolutely breathtaking suite overlooking the pool until we noticed — within about five seconds — the unmistakable smell of natural gas.   I have a nose for the stuff, and we live in a country where natural gas is the order of the day, so trust me, it’s not intended to be leaking out of the pipes at that rate.  It was also true of the sister hotel across the parking lot.   Pity the man who stands next to the pipe some day to enjoy a smoke.    I mentioned this to the manager of both properties, but got that, “Yeah, whadda you know?” look.

I heard a story on Monday about a couple who saved for years for a trip to Hawaii only to be given a walkout room next to the garbage dumpsters.   “I saved a lifetime for this trip;” the woman told the front desk, “and I’m not spending it in that room.”    Good for her.   But later that day, somebody else probably paid top dollar for it.

The most expensive room on our trip was nice in one respect, and the worst in others.   At Country Inn and Suites in Buckhead, GA; the sensors on the elevator weren’t working, so that when the doors decided they were closing, they closed.   I was lucky to escape with my life on two occasions.    On the last day we had to make our own beds.   Each night we had to stuff the door with towels because the door didn’t fit the frame.    They ran out of coffee in the lobby constantly, and they ran out of regular coffee for the in-room coffee machines.   We phoned from the subway for the shuttle bus only to still be waiting 30 minutes later.   No apology.   Most times we ended up walking the four blocks to the subway anyway.

But at least they had breakfast.    In Washington, DC, a few months earlier, our hotel didn’t provide breakfast, which seems to be a staple of mid-price properties but not the more upscale ones.   Of course, at that place, intimidation was also the order of the day, so for our final night we were happy to find something cheaper — and better — a few blocks away.    Their subway shuttle actually worked, too.

But while this law is true when price comparing between hotels; it’s also true when price comparing within hotels.   The walk-in, last minute guy who is being charged top price is often receiving the worst room and the worst service.     I’ve actually been on both sides of this equation so I also know what it’s like to be the guy getting the preferred rate, and coming out much better in every other respect compared to the person paying more.

There’s no justice, no equity, no fairness.

The secret:  Find a mid-price chain or two that works for you, and avoid conversations with other guests about rates paid.