December news: Ubisoft workers in Halifax unionize! January news: Ubisoft shuts down Halifax office!

Coincidence? Nah! That's just how the cookie crumbles here in the allegedly socialist utopia of Canada. It ain't no utopia for workers, certainly not if they're gonna get all uppity and unionize. In Canada, socialism is for the corporate sector, not the workers. Recall it was only a year prior that the first Amazon warehouse in Canada, in Laval Quebec, was unionized. Amazon, owned by an insatiable greedbag whose wealth runs into the hundreds of billions, responded by shutting down all seven "fullfilment centres" in the province, throwing 1,700 workers into unemployment. While we're mourning the shabby state of worker protections in Canada, let's not forget the first Walmart to unionize was immediately shut down by the mega-billionaire Walton clan. That was over ten years ago. What has government done since then to protect workers rights? Why, utterly nothing, of course! This is totally unsatisfactory. Employers who violate worker's rights to unionize need to be held to account.

Best of times for Amazon and Walmart; worst of times for independent retail

As Toronto re-enters lockdown on account of the "second wave," there's umbrage in the air over the fact that Walmart and some other big chains will remain open, while independent retailers are forced to close.

Independent retail has been up against it for a long time, long before the pandemic. In a nutshell, the reason is this; people would rather save a few cents shopping at Amazon or Walmart, than to pay a little more and keep their local independents in business. 

The pandemic is the final nail in the coffin for a wide swath of independent businesses. We'll be happy enough to blame the virus for their demise, when the truth is that everyone who's ever shopped Walmart, Costco, or Amazon deserves a share of the blame. 

When we are conditioned to measure our lives by how much crap we consume, a retail model that optimizes crap-per-dollar will inevitably prevail.

Shame on all of us.

Amazon does not create jobs; it destroys them

Here's a good-news story!

Amazon is bringing 800 jobs to Caledon! They'll be shipping books, electronics, and toys from this "fulfillment centre." (BTW google "working conditions at Amazon warehouses" and you'll get a new appreciation for George Orwell. Fulfilment isn't what fulfillment centres are about.)

Caledon's good-news story follows a mere two months after Ottawa got a similar good-news story. They'll be getting a fulfillment centre too! According to local MP Andrew Leslie, "it will employ approximately 1000 people (in) good middle class jobs..."

God bless Amazon! They're spreading their good middle class jobs all over the place!

The euphoria is almost palpable!


Alas, MP Andrew Leslie apparently has no inkling of what a middle class job looks like. Leslie retired from the Canadian Forces with the rank of Lieutenant General. That's a job that pays over $20 thousand  -  per month! Between his CF pension and his MP gig (base salary $172,000/yr) the double-dipping Leslie is a bona fide one percenter!

Amazon warehouse employees, on the other hand, are what you'd call the working poor. They're paid a whisker over minimum wage. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos (net worth 143 billion USD) is fiercely anti-union. A substantial portion of his US work-force requires food stamps to get by. This is not what any reasonable person would call a "good middle class job."

Here's another thing to consider; Amazon has twice the revenue per employee as its most efficient bricks-and-mortar competitor, Walmart. That's another way of saying that for every warehouse job Amazon creates, at least two jobs will disappear in the bricks-and-mortar retail sector. Amazon comes not to create jobs, but to destroy them!

Walmart "associate" is not a middle class job either, and I'm under no illusions about Walmart being a workers' paradise, but I've never heard of Walmart employees peeing in bottles because they'll fail to meet their quota if they take a bathroom break, or of ambulances waiting in the parking lot to ferry employees to the hospital as they drop from exhaustion.


But here's even worse news; nowhere in the various mainstream news stories on these new Ontario warehouses, does any reporter (you know, those bold sleuths who pride themselves on speaking truth to power) so much as hint that there might be a dark side to all this good news.

Welcome to the Kemble Emporium

Here it is.



This is a vacant storefront in the heart of Kemble. It used to be the general store in Kemble, but it has long since given up the ghost in favor of the Walmarts of this world.

I've been brainstorming like crazy with my pal Susan M, a Kemble lifer, on how we might be able to repurpose this old general store into a tavern/roadhouse/wine bar.

It's on offer, along with the house next door, for a paltry $129 thousands.

We been brainstorming pretty hard, and we can see the Kemble Impouring'em rising. First of all, we'll be the only liquor establishment between Owen Sound and Wiarton, at least if you take the scenic route. That's gotta be good news not only to thirsty locals, but to the folks from away en route to their million dollar summer homes on the water.

Secondly, that second house on the property really opens up some options. That could be a B&B. We're thinking we could offer up a special deal, where every hundred dollar bar tab gets you a free night's lodging at the Bed and Breakfast next door!

What a brilliant cross-marketing strategy! Don't worry about your excess alcohol consumption; we got a free pillow waiting for you at the end of the evening!

The Farm Manager is aboard too, and she'd be a valuable asset. All I know about wine is some is red and some is white. She actually knows all those fancy French names for them.

Like Peeno Greejio and Shablee and shit.

That looks to me like a space where you'd have more than enough room to have a little live entertainment, and the local area is chock full of A1+ musical types. Within a half hour drive we got everybody from the Becketts to the guy who played keyboards on a couple of Pink Floyd albums. Open mic night is gonna be spectacular!

Here's another salient fact; depending on how you read the maps, we are hard by the Bruce Trail! Just imagine all those super-thirsty and extra hungry hikers trekking past the front door! Hell, we could charge twenty bucks for a bag of Doritos and a bottle of water and they'd be thanking us!

And here's the coup de ville; the unsuspecting tourist stops in for wings and a jug of beer on Friday afternoon, and before they know it, they're waking up in their "free" lodgings on Sunday morning, and the Kemble United Methodist Pentecostal Unitarian Catholic Church is a mere lurch across the way!

Yup, we got you covered at the Kemble Emporium!

On-line shopping is doing to the mall what the mall did to Main Street

Killing it.

You'll recall the (muted) outcry when the mall was killing off Main Street.

On-line shopping has killed so many malls that the dead malls have their own website.

After all, who can resist buying that plastic made-in-China piece of shit at Amazon for $29 when it would have been $34 at Walmart?

Or $45 at Brewster's Hardware on Main Street.

We all want to save money, don't we?

Well, we're saving money in big fat bundles. Not only is Main Street shopping gone, the malls are on their way out too.

But we're saving money like crazy.

We'll save ourselves right into Armageddon... or at least Amazonageddon.

Iconic Canadian rockers sell out... to Walmart!

That's not what I would have expected.

It hit me hard when I saw that shabby Dylan commercial during the Superbowl. Bolshevik Bob shilling for a post-bailout Chrysler. Shilling for one of the American car companies that used guile and deception to weasel out of their responsibilities to their workforce.

But that's nothing compared to the loathing that overwhelmed me when I realized that Rush has lent their good name to no less a capitalist behemoth than Walmart.

Walmart!

Then again, I shouldn't be that surprised. Rush always had a somewhat dodgy relationship with the Aynn Rand school of fuck-everybody selfishness.

Rush.

Working Man.

Walmart.

The end may indeed be nigh...

Towards a drone economy

According to The Guardian, we have glimpsed the future, and the future is drones.

That's right; not only will Jeff Bezos put Walmart out of business with drone-delivery of everything from your morning coffee to your grocery order to that jury duty summons, but drones will utterly revolutionize the US economy.

Apparently drones are the next big thing. Drones are to 21st century America what cars were to the 20th; the lifeblood of the economy.

States are outdoing one another to seduce drone manufacturers. Everybody wants the jobs bonanza that will come with a drone assembly plant. Probably a lost cause; just a couple more technological break-throughs and it'll be drones building drones.

Investors are betting billions on an explosion in drone demand.

It's a brave new drone world!

Where do jobs come from?

It is a universally understood "fact" that rich people create jobs. Unfortunately, rich people can only create jobs with their after-tax income. Therefore, the ultimate job-creation environment is one in which rich people pay no taxes whatsoever.

That carefully crafted ode to Joseph Goebbels' Big Lie Theory has attained the status of fact through no other mechanism than rote repetition. Watch the business networks for awhile and you will soon learn that the terms "job creators" and "rich" are 100% synonymous. This fact free-floats above empirical reality, completely immune to the demands of logic or proof.

It's just obvious.

It's just something everybody knows.

If you're a fan of the annual billionaire lists put out by the likes of Forbes et al, you will no doubt have noticed that year after year there are fewer people on that list who can claim to have had any net positive impact on job creation whatsoever. Quite the opposite. As the rise of the Rumpelstiltskin economy shows, the attainment of great wealth is more and more the province of creative paper-shufflers.

So if jobs aren't the product of rich people giving back to society in appreciation for their low tax rates, just where do they come from?

Long before the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford was a successful engineer who tinkered with self-propelled vehicles in his spare time. Like many other inveterate tinkerers of the era, he was driven by a curiosity, quite independent from any lust for riches, to see if his experiments could rival or surpass the achievements of the other tinkerers.

That drive led in due course to the Ford Motor Company and tens of thousands of jobs being created, not because Ford was a wealthy man, but because he had come up with a product that the general population found useful.

Wealth followed.

A manufacturing enterprise will grow if it succeeds in producing a product that consumers want to buy. Once that happens, the job growth will of necessity follow.

That pattern is universal throughout the manufacturing and service industries. The Waltons, love them or hate them, didn't become America's biggest employers because they were really rich and created jobs in return for the low taxes bestowed upon them by the state. They built stores and hired people because the public had an appetite for the way they delivered consumer goods.

Wealth followed.

Real wealth has always been the result of real people providing products and services that others find useful and are willing to pay for. This holds true regardless of the marginal tax rate levied on "the rich".

The next time you hear that claim that "job creators" will stop creating jobs if they they have to pay more than 15% in taxes, remember this; the paper-shufflers objecting to paying taxes don't create jobs to begin with, and generally attain their wealth through non-productive economic activity. Taxing speculators and hedge fund artists at 100% would have utterly no impact on job creation.

So let's tax them!

Death of a dream

I was more than a little taken aback today that Wal-Mart is doing away with the ubiquitous Wal-Mart greeter.

More than "taken aback." I was crushed.

That's a sunset career I've had my eye on many years.

One of the wonders that Wal-Mart has wrought is to make minimum wage work dignified, even desirable. And the greeter gig pretty much seemed like the apex of the minimum wage universe. Stand around at the front of the store and offer up a friendly "welcome to Wal-Mart" to all who pass through those sliding glass doors.

Now, offering up a friendly anything isn't in my natural-born reportoire, but I think I could have faked it well enough to bat this one out of the park. Or at least turn it into a two run double.

You stand there, pace back and forth a little, somebody comes in that you know, you catch up for a bit. Help the little old ladies get their carts, help the big young ladies get their carts. Put in your three or four shifts every week and bingo, you've put the gold in the golden years.

Well, that was then and this is now. Wal-Mart has decreed that in order to plump up the already plumpest bottom line in retail, they're gonna have to put the greeters out to pasture. Or not out to pasture exactly, but back in the store, stocking shelves and generally being just another Wal-Mart "associate".

It's a sad sad day.

Even when it's a month late, winter is always a complete surprise

It's the last week in December. Out of nowhere there's a six inch dump of snow overnight.

Who knew? Snow? In December? Who has ever heard of such a thing?

Needless to say, no one is prepared for such a surprise. Every tire store in town suddenly has a weeks worth of backlog on having snow tires installed. Many of them are sold out. Even Walmart is sold out.

Remember when TSC was remaindering their last snow-blowers back in March, at half price? You thought about it. Scratched your head and thought about it some more. Nah... you decided against saving that six or seven hundred dollars. After all, what with global warming, maybe you'll never see snow again.

Ha! Now you wake up with six inches of snow, that piece of crap 1980's era snow-blower you've been thinking about replacing won't start, and you hustle down to TSC or Sears or Walmart. Half price? No, in fact they're sold out and back-ordered. Really back ordered. If you put your money down today your snow-blower will be waiting for you mid-January.

In the meantime, you might as well pick up a snow shovel while you're there. You can't find the one you bought last year.

It's under the snow somewhere.

Kmart's never ending death spiral; an insiders account

By the time Sam Walton was born, Sebastian S. Kresge was one of the richest men in the world. If Sebastian had the slightest inkling that baby Sam would eventually erase Kresge from America's retail map, he would have found a way to strangle wee Sam in his crib.

This will come as a shock to the Falling Downs faithful, but I was once a Kmart insider. A very low-level insider, mind you, but an insider none the less.

I was a department head. No retail experience whatsoever. Down on my luck, but a fresh haircut saw me walk into a Kmart in the late seventies, fill out an application, and walk out as Manager of the Automotive Department.

Being a department manager had its perks and its responsibilities. One of the perks was access to the paperwork that showed the wholesale price of everything on offer in the store. We were selling twenty dollar items that cost us two bucks. Obscure automotive parts, but people bought them. No wonder Sebastian got rich.

Another perk was the perogative to arbitrarily create mark-downs. If one of my buddies came in looking for, say, a twenty foot extension ladder, we'd find a scratch on it, and voila, that hundred dollar ladder was marked down to twenty bucks.

One of the things I'll always remember is how many people were perfectly happy to screw their employer. The guy who ran the shoe department would wear a new pair of shoes home every day.

The part-time guy in the building supply department had a great thing going. He needed to call an assistant manager to open the shipping doors. Unlike the full time day shift "department manager", he wasn't entrusted with his own key. But once that door was open and the assistant manager had left, he'd be cutting the sweetest deals. Got your eye on a new bathroom vanity, regular price $399? If you've got fifty cash in your pocket it's yours while the door is open.

I personally take a dim view of stealing from my employer, but I admit I had a lucrative sideline. Medicinal herbs. It was an ideal setup. Kept a stash in my stock room. Folks always knew where to find me. Didn't have to hang out in pool halls and strip joints. Good for the customer too. They didn't have to venture to a pool hall or a strip joint. "Hey honey, I'm just going up to Kmart at the mall for a minute." Solved a lot of problems on both sides of the equation.

Alas, all good things come to an end. The downfall of my Kmart career can be attributed to a couple of young hotties in the pet department. In my relentless campaign to impress them, I'd have my 300 pound teenage assistant go down to the pet department and surreptitiously release a couple of canaries or budgies.

Then he and I would make like Stanley and Livingstone in the jungle, carrying a ladder and butterfly nets from one end of the store to the other. We even found some pith helmets somewhere. We'd zero in on the  awol bird, plant our ladder, and quietly hone in on it with the butterfly net.

This was a game you could extend indefinitely. Just make sure you scare the bird off with that net instead of catching it. To impress the gals in the pet department you'd have to catch it eventually of course, but this little gambit made for many fun days working at Kmart.

The management structure in the store was something to behold. Our store had as many as twelve assistant managers at one time. It was a company strategy, applied Darwinism at its finest. You'd have these twelve guys (I don't remember a single female assistant manager at the time) all out-doing one another to climb the corporate ladder.

When the big dogs from head office made a store visit, you had an absolute frenzy of ass-kissing. There would be a parade of vice presidents and regional managers and assistant managers snaking aisle by aisle through the store, everybody determined to demonstrate to the people further up the hierarchy that they were better than the person immediately ahead of them.

Given that my income from the sideline was several times my income as a department manager, I kept myself aloof from that sort of thing. I had purloined a TV and a Lay-Z-Boy recliner from the furniture department and had a little lounge area set up in my stock room.

One Saturday morning just after Christmas I was relaxing there, one of the pet department hotties on my lap, rum and eggnogs at hand, watching the Saturday morning cartoons, when the parade of management wannabes decided for some reason to tour the stock room. If memory serves, we'd just sampled some of the medicinal stuff moments before.

That turned out to be my last day as an insider at Kmart.

Little did anyone in that parade realize that Sam Walton was about to cut their grass. The carnage continues. Today Kmart announced the closing of another 100 Sears and Kmart stores. In a strategy that does grave disservice to wherever those Kmart managers get their MBA's, Kmart decided a few years ago to buy that other sinking giant of the post-Walmart world, Sears.

And here they are today, still retreating and regrouping and running from the Walmart juggernaut. Another hundred stores closed.

As for me, that was my one and only foray into retail. Much too old for it now. But I hear that there's a kid up at Walmart, in the automotive department, there everyday from five till closing, can fix you up with some primo medicinal herb.