Stampede 101 is in the books; now the cleanup will. . .never begin.

Calgary Stampede 101 is in the books; now the cleanup will. . .never begin.

 

Say you threw a party for a million of your friends, because you knew you could rake in billions.  Would you feel a slight noblesse oblige to clean up a bit afterwards, after you’d kept the whole community up with noise and revelry and lights and fireworks after 11 p.m.?  Let’s put it in more comprehensible terms.  Say you had a big backyard, and you invited 100 pals over every year on a summer evening for a binge you knew, and your neighbours knew, from long experience, would probably inconvenience many but at least would be over after a bit.  You’d charge $100 a head, and you’d know there’d be some collateral damage.  But since you’d made so much money, and had the indulgence of your neighbours, maybe you’d make a slight effort to clean up, maybe go and pick up cigarette butts on the other side of the fence, etc.

 

You ain’t the Stampede board.  Every year, the Stampede leaves incredible waste along the Elbow river that sketches the Stampede grounds on more or less three sides.  The grounds themselves, well, different story.  Each year, the experienced carnies show up and erect their tacky booths and rides with lightning efficiency and practice, then take them down and move out, almost before dawn, so as to move on to the next “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” just down the road.  The grounds are suddenly once again empty and calm and acres of pavement can once again sing a siren song for vehicles that rarely come.  Different story on the other side of the chain-link fence, one millimeter from the Stampede grounds.  There, the predictable garbage left behind by the mass volume of visitors will stay or be buried or grown over or absorbed by the environment for. . .ever.  Mostly fast-food garbage, but also clothing and other kinds of detritus, always there in the wake of the Stampede, never picked up, despite the billions the Stampede has taken in and the windswept concrete grounds you could land a plane on on the other side of the fence.

 

When you pass along the Elbow river (or those parts of it that are passable now, in the wake of the floods), you really do come back to the neighbour analogy.  I mean, say I’m a millionaire (or billionaire) member of the Stampede board of directors, and I throw a big whoop-up at my place.  Odds are, I hire people to clean up after me.  If you’re just a normal person and you have a party at your dwelling, you probably clean up after yourself.  But if you can make billions off of hosting a party with 100s of thousands of visitors, if you’re the Stampede board, anything 1 millimeter outside your hallowed precincts is. . .somebody else’s problem.  So the filth piles up, year in and year out.  With a crew of minimum-wage workers, the Stampede could probably pick up after themselves along the river in a day.  But no, that would be a ludicrous abuse of the Stampede board’s sense of entitlement.  Imagine, being asked to take responsibility for hosting “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” and giving a damn about the outdoors one foot outside of your doors!!  Next thing you know, Putin will be running for a third term, and we’ll be getting robo-calls telling us where we can’t vote!!

 

It’s surprising, in other ways.  Most venues that cherish themselves will go to many lengths to make sure the run-up to their establishments looks good and inviting, too.  Not the Stampede board, that owns most of the land around the Stampede, anyway.  As the decades have passed on, one of Calgary’s historic neighbourhoods, Victoria Park, has been essentially completely destroyed, looking first like hockey teeth, then like 90-year old gums, if gums were parking lots.  A largely uninhabited condo tower here and there, and empty (of course) unmaintained empty lots.  People who own empty lots and sit on them for decades should be forced to keep them clear of needles and nails and dangerous garbage, but that doesn’t apply to the Stampede, naturally.  In the Erlton area nearby, the underground parkades for pricey condos are gradually drying out, but the few remaining old houses or low-rise apartments are all boarded up and condemned. the renters gone to . . .wherever—the condos 30 feet away, they can always be saved and repaired, for they are worth something.  Such a blessing for the owners, really, eviction of riff-raff by natural disaster, no need to get your hands dirty.  The lands around the Stampede grounds have that curious upper-class derelict feel of, well, much of downtown Edmonton.  Useful land that could be used for something, but used only for surface parking lots until the owner can convince in-the-pocket governments to use citizens’ dollars to build things not one citizen in 50 could afford to enter, or one with a job as a $10/hr private security guard.

 

Say you were a wannabe aristocrat, and you wanted to have lots of friends.  You leased yourself a Mercedes, and asked girls out on dates.  But then you filled it with Wendy’s cheeseburger wrappers and used tissues and smelly t-shirts—that’s how the Stampede approaches the notion of community integration.

 

If you ever see a Stampede talking head on TV, s/he’ll always talk about the great volunteer spirit of the Stampede.  Sad how that simply does not extend one inch beyond the Stampede grounds.  Rotting garbage left for others to deal with.

 

Of course, people will say, “dude, if it bugs you so much, why don’t you just pick up the garbage yourself??”  Sort of like if you host a birthday party for your kid, and some other kid pukes, you get right on the phone and tell the other parents to come over and clean up their kid’s puke.  Well, if I lived right next to the grounds, and I were walking my dog of an evening, maybe I would take a plastic bag with me and pick up after not only Rover but also the Stampede.  But I don’t.  Normally, when I’m on the paths near the river, I’m running, or maybe riding or rollerblading.  I’m not going to bring bags in my car and zigzag back and forth into the bushes as I’m jogging so I can clean up after the multi-billion dollar industry that is the Stampede.

 

Do cowboys have a code, or codes?  I’m not a cowboy, but my guess is that they would tell you that they did.  But the people that represent them and mutually enrich themselves, the Stampede, have only one code: “make a hell of a mess, and if someone else has to clean it up, so what?”

 

Yahoo.

 

-zr

A Match Made in Heaven – Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart Unite!!

A Match Made in Heaven – Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart Unite!!

 

Shoppers kills millions of trees a week on advertising, trying to lure people to stores to buy merchandise—on sale—that Shoppers doesn’t have and, almost incontrovertibly, never did intend to have.  Numerous times I got Shoppers flyers that *said* they would have something on sale, but, of course, the sale items were never present.  Staff told me they were directed by managers to say that rain checks were NOT available.  If the sale was on for, say, a week, I’d ask the staff if the ~supposed~ sale items would be restocked.  “Uh, no, I don’t think so,” or, more frankly, “No,” was the response of the employees.  Even Safeway, hardly a company I admire, has employees who will even _recommend_ rain checks when they evidently don’t have stock.  Time after time at Shoppers, a ticketed price would not be higher than the one charged at the till.  Cashiers would say, “well, go get me the sticker.”  So I would.  I was always right.  It got so idiotic that, eventually, I would just rip the sticker off the shelf under the product I was buying, because I knew the charged price at the till would be much higher, and I would be asked to prove that the stated price on the sticker really was the stated price.  Unbelievable sleaze.  Consumers, forced to prove that Shoppers Drug Mart’s prices really were what they were.  Amazing.  But that’s just how Shoppers rolls.  The consumer is always wrong.

 

I was going to say in this post that, on the whole, Shoppers employees had been decent and helpful people.  But on reflection, I can’t come anywhere near saying that.  On reflection, I would have to say that, as a group, they are just about the most disaffected and sullen employees I have ever seen.  When you bring your own bag so as to avoid Galen Weston’s 99.9% profit margin (Weston charges you 10c per plastic bag--how much do you think 1000 plastic bags cost Weston?  A buck?  Two bucks?), they simply stare at it sullenly, as if they have been instructed by management to prevent Galen from freely enriching himself by asking consumers to pay for things, 99.9X over, they have not bought.  Often, they will not put your items in a bag you bring yourself—that would be an affront to Galen Weston’s reception of his 99.9% profit on bags.  I remember one excellent middle-aged woman who worked at Shoppers; she understood customer service, or at least acted like she did.  She was there about three months.

 

You might say to yourself, “dude, if you hate the place so much, why go there?”  Well, two reasons.  The location I mostly have in mind (yes, they are spread like lice everywhere, and the whole point of monopolies and oligopolies is to ensure omnipresence that eliminates consumer choice, especially amongst the least mobile and most vulnerable, the seniors and the handicapped) happens to be feet from a couple of local and/or family-owned businesses where I do business all the time.  So it’s easy for me to go in and check out the latest flyer-advertised lies from Shoppers.  I guess it even did become a bit of an amusement a few times.  I’d be shopping a few feet away, and I’d go in to Shoppers just to see what whopping lies they were offering in their flyers that week.  I’d get told the regular routine, that, no, they didn’t have that, that, no, they didn’t know if they’d get anymore, that, no, in fact, they probably wouldn’t, that, no, they really didn’t know if/think they could do rainchecks, etc.  Every time I see Galen Weston’s grinning face on tv, but know that he is the worst kind of liar, offering things he not only does not have, but never intended to offer in the first place, well, it makes me feel better about supporting people and businesses that _aren’t_ liars like him.  It’s good not to be a liar like Galen Weston. 

 If you ever look at a Shoppers flyer, have a look at the miniscule fine print that goes on forever, at the bottom, on the back of the flyer.  After warning about the exact date period of its flyer, Shoppers states, for those with x-ray vision, "We reserve the right to limit quantities."  In other words, we'll advertise whatever we like, but we are under no obligation actually to have anything we advertise.  Yeah, sure, I get it; if I advertise bananas at .19c/lb, I'm probably going to run out after a few truckloads.  But Shoppers never offers deals like that, and it doesn't contemplate truckloads.  For shame.

Gotta be tough to be a guest at a Weston family party.  Imagine showing up and being asked to bring your own cutlery, or have to pay for it, etc.  Oh, lavish gift bags or swag at night’s end, I’m sure, but make sure you’ve got your own bags, or it’ll cost ya.  I wonder if Galen Weston’s mom told him that the maid would prepare him a school lunch, but only if he paid the maid a fee for the Tupperware, of which Hilary would take a 99.9% cut.  Comically, or just in a blood-dictator display of moral relativism, Galen would probably say he’s just being an environmentalist (whilst taking a cool 99.9% profit on the side, thus pleasing shareholders infinitely—win-win).  Most people who are concerned about the environment do carry their own bags; rich people like Galen don’t give a care whether or not they have to pay more; those who, for various reasons, don’t have an option but to have some sort of container for their goods that they buy from Galen, they’re subject to his 99.9% profit margin.

 

In a concerted effort to drive up prices for seniors, Shoppers-Loblaws said that the Ontario government’s legislation regarding generic drugs would hurt consumers, forcing the cartel to jack up prices in other ways.  In fact, it was any small indepedent pharmacy that had the most to lose from the legislation.  The billionaire crying poor. Meanwhile, Shoppers’ stock soared, making profits off those pinioned seniors that  Shoppers never even imagined. 

 

Now let us turn to the other suitor.  Loblaws (actually I love that name, for if you treat it as the compound word it clearly is, it means “get around” or “circumvent” or “get over” or “get away from” actual “law”)  was in on the “environment” game early, though of course that stretches back centuries and doesn’t represent any kind of new business innovation.  When I was young, I got a job at a new Loblaw’s brand extension store.  We spent hours filling out these idiotic American psychological multiple-choice question tests.  A typical one would go like this:

 

“An employee you know recently removed an apple from a display.  You know this went to his child.  He is not wealthy.  What do you do?”

 

A) Report the incident immediately to a supervisor.

B) Remind yourself that, the next time a supervisor shows up, maybe a week from now, you’ll mention it.

C) Grab an orange and make fruit salad.

D) String him up with piano wire.

 

Needless to say, the correct answer was always “D,” and after about 100 questions, I kind of got the hang of this and started enjoying myself.  The same question kept coming up, over and over, but with slightly nuanced changes, such as “C) Grab a melon and make a fruit salad.”  Every once in a blue, blue moon, perhaps just to convince Galen’s crew that he wasn’t hiring a complete sociopath (though that was, in effect, what he wanted), I’d break down in my circling and say that an offending employee shouldn’t be garroted immediately on site.  Anyway, I sure was hired on site after a 2-minute interview which made the 2-hour American psychological test seem like a one-item-only lineup.

 

Then a curious thing happened.  I discovered, after only a couple weeks on the job, that most of us, fully 1/3 or much more, had been hired to be fired.  I don’t think I ever saw the same co-worker once.  Standardized, ludicrously idiotic American psychological employee multiple-choice tests are cheap (though it cost Loblaw’s, through a genius head-office flack with hair plugs and last-year’s Porsche and an American contractor, probably millions), but just conducting an interview and asking a few questions—well, no, that would be impossible.  Might be efficient, but it doesn’t seem efficient, so no-can-do.  Meanwhile, we were pressed to work maniacally, idiotically, to favour speed over anything else.  We ran around like idiots, slashing at boxes with our Xacto knives, smashing into brand new displays and tearing up 1-week old infrastructure, leaking water and filth all over the produce area that would only rarely be cleaned up, etc.  Displays often went empty, so we’d cut up boxes, up and up and up, to make it seem like there was produce where there wasn’t any.  Exotic vegetable sections, that virtually no-one knew about, sat like museum pieces, with the few potential customers who did accidentally come by almost recoiling at the rankness.  We put sugar cane (for all you blacks out there!!) alluringly in a garbage bin from hardware.  Sometimes half the area would be full of only bagged shell peanuts because that was all we had.  Consumers would ask questions, but we’d just say “customer service,” knowing they’d spend more hours in the lineup there than if they’d just started to wander the aisles themselves (of if we were given, say, one hour of paid training, one hour out of our lives for which Galen, in his, charges, say, $100k).

 

All the time, Yogi and Booboo wandered our areas, the tall supervisor and the short supervisor.  They both wore disgusted smirks, except when they looked at one another; then their faces softened and became almost mild in their contemplation of those beneath them.  They never, ever spoke to employees—that they did through the harried middle-aged department manager. They clearly never once had a new idea or an innovation or a suggestion or any kind of productive thought to offer about the business they were involved in (otherwise, we might have seen it, or they might have gone to bat for it with Galen); but they were well paid, and a man with a polyester tie who is *not* in uniform in a grocery department is a big, big man indeed.  They were those most curious of men, who, since they appeared to think and certainly did almost nothing while they were at work (but got paid by Loblaw’s richly for it), must have done remarkable things at night at home.  Model planes?  Train sets?  Who’s to know?

 

Once, we got this extraordinary pep-talk from some guy who was, I guess, a Loblaws hotshot.  He took us down this wide corridor, where we were supposed to be recycling but weren’t, and a small group of us listened to him.  The thrust of his speech (and he was kind of pelvis-forward), was that we all didn’t have to be like us; we could be like him.  He had on a greasy 2-piece (or maybe it was his/from his hair) and a dark blue open-button shirt.  He told us, repeatedly, that we didn’t have to be this way, trimming the butts off lettuce.  He reflected that he, too, had often been trimming the butts off lettuce.  Trimming the butts off lettuce was clearly a momentous experience in his lifetime.  I honestly can’t convey what he did import to us (and I would remember), but he was clear on this matter and on this matter alone, that if we trimmed butts off lettuce to the very best of our abilities *now*, then we would not be trimming the butts off of lettuce later, so as to look like him, an ersatz bassist for Journey, doing tribute shows 20 years after the fact.

 

If you think my sympathy for this guy is retrospectively mirthless, think again.  It should have been much more immediate.  That guy was a dinosaur in ways even he didn’t comprehend.  If I had had the presence of mind at the time, I would have said, “dude, this is Galen Weston’s Loblaws—NO employee ever trims the butts off lettuce—EVER.  THAT is the CUSTOMER’S job.  You snooze, you lose, you’re out of a job, Jose, because no-one ever, ever trims the butt off a lettuce anymore.  Dora and Doreen do that AT HOME, get it?  That would be like putting groceries in a bag for the people who make you millions!  What are you, some kind of dork?"

 

It’s not my misfortune to have to visit Loblaws outlets in Canada very much, but sometimes when I’m travelling, it happens.  I must admit, I was astonished by Galen Weston’s chutzpah the first time I was asked to pay for my own bags at a 99.9% markup (well, there’s an instance—you’re travelling, and you have to get groceries; airlines will probably make you pay even for grocery bags, so you don’t bring them; meantime, Galen Weston profits 99.9, or in all probability 99.999%, from your beholdenness; Loblaws shareholders applaud like Bieber fanatics, Galen cackles in his Range Rover), but probably what I was most disappointed about, at the time, was his effort to demean staff and customers.  Place sliding gates at checkouts, make people get the hell out soon, make them bag their own stuff and make them feel like peons, make staff dismissive, and so on.  This is a pure power-play on Galen Weston’s behalf.  No-one needs a tutorial in business 101; make an environment inviting initially (greeter, muzak), then try to get them the hell out as fast as possible—narrow corridors, no staff, all things pointed to the exit once you’ve laid down cash money to the Westons.  It’s quite disgusting, and where he learned his sick morality, I guess only he wouldn’t know.  I’m still pretty loyal to a lot of family businesses and those that really are pretty reputable, like CO-OP. 

 

Anyway, although environmental issues have never been at the absolute forefront of my mind (because, uh, duh, I just do not now nor ever have created much waste at all), I must speak to Galen Weston’s and Loblaws’s ongoing lies about environmental accountability.  When I worked for a Loblaws store, Loblaws was full-throttle on the new “green” movement.  They touted that they recycled everything, that their stores were giving back, that they fortified police dogs with nearly-rancid cottage cheese, and so on.  Perhaps they’ve had to tone that down now, lately.  As a Loblaws employee, enriching the Westons, I lived a lie.  I let the Westons, with all their massive armory of public relations, misrepresent me and tell Canadian consumers that they were recycling.  In truth, not .1% of anything ever got recycled when they said recycling was being done.  I made Galen Weston richer and richer and richer by working for him, while he lied and lied and lied and took my money and used it to pretend he was someone he was not.  Recycling? Not .1%.  If you had tried to recycle, you would have been fired in a New York instant.  It was PR, and only PR, and for the Westons to pretend that they didn’t know it would be like Harper trying to pretend that he didn’t know that Mike Duffy was getting 90k while all his senior staff just—accidentally—happened to know about it.  Galen Weston used me and abused me and he made a lot of money out of doing it.  I gave him back, in return, pliable labour he’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere, and that includes Cambodia and Bangladesh (but he won’t speak about that).

 

Galen Weston would tell you: “hey, I’ve gotta compete—I provide jobs” (if I were interviewing Galen Weston for a job, I would ask him about what he knows about competing, and what he knows about having a job—might be the shortest interview in history).  Galen Weston would say, “look, all my competitors lie, so I have to lie, too; it’s just that I have to find the most creative ways of lying—and I hire people to do that!!”  Galen Weston would say, look, I run a multi-billion dollar operation here; there’s always going to be some bad apples.  You can’t expect me to know about that.”  Uh-uh.  Morally speaking, the buck stops with you.  If *anyone* has an ability to control bad apples, it’s a multi-bazillionaire in his mansion who seems to have no other time but to create fake homey ad-spots.  What do you do with your days, Galen?  Work anytime?  Maybe the best thing that could happen to Galen Weston would be for him to get a job.  Maybe get a job not lying about his family’s business, but trying to make it more truthful.  Now that, that would be something.

 

Final words go to my manager who kept me.  He was tremendously under the gun, a not-so-bad man made to be a really bad man.  He led by example, but his example was beyond disconcerting.  I’d work to 11, be back at 4 a.m., he’d be there when I left, show up at 6; next day I’d start at 7 a.m., he’d be there, 11 p.m. I’d leave, he’d be there.  And so on.  He set a great example, but hard work was not an example I needed to have set for me; I’d already done that.  If hard work that will destroy you and your family and your marriage and your ability to survive or be a parent or even a human being in the service of Galen Weston who didn’t have to work 20/24, well, he pulled that off.  Galen Weston and his shareholders loved it, though they would obviously never create homey fake ads about it.  That manager is almost certainly dead now.  Galen Weston didn’t give him a medal, but that manager helped put another new Jaguar in Galen Weston’s driveway.

 -zr