we are still living in a material world

In the midst of a global pandemic* – is that redundant? When pan means global but without a quantifying word it seems to carry less gravitas.

In March of 2020 we boiled down our society to the bare essentials. Basically anything that didn’t feed, heal or clean us is closed.  Meaning our fate rides, largely, on some of the lowest paid workers.  We also created a two tier system in which those with a credit card could, to a certain degree, buy safety.

As a society we are daily, and rightly so, lauding healthcare workers and teachers – oh yeah we had to shut down schools in an attempt to slow this bugger down and this was in the midst of an Ontario wide claw back to education funding. Doesn’t seem like that much of a cost to anyone anymore now does it.

But what about the home care workers who earn low wages and have been forgotten on the PPE distribution circuit? How about the ‘essential’ workers who have employers slow to respond with safety measures and have not monetarily compensated them?  Technically no one has to add excess compensation - there’s no law stating this is the case – but many have stepped up, mostly under public pressure and done so, mainly, I assume, to assuage staying-a-home CEO’s what I hope is crippling guilt. (Yeah, yeah I know that’s not what they are feeling but it makes me feel better if I think they are.)

And the pinnacle of a mostly online world? The credit card. Without one navigating our current world is tough. It means shopping in store. It means not having some things just because you can’t access them.  The recent shut down of pet food stores meant a strange bit of transaction over a weekend. Fortunately this story has a great ending. The pet store I use, Global Pet Foods, had stated on their site that eTransfer and PayPal were a payment option. A lovely soul answered my emails and confirmed payment on a Sunday night at 8 p.m. so that I could go pick up the food on my day off that week. But if they hadn’t offered that service I guess I would have had to go purchase a prepaid credit card, in a store, to make that payment. Which would mean another potential exposure. And that’s what I mean when I say a credit card buys safety. 

It’s my personal opinion that we’ve reached a point in our technology where if you have a bank account you should be able to purchase things online. Of course that gets into a huge discussion of internet security and bank fees. I’m not going there except to say, banks, massive profiteers already, really need to be legislated to allow anyone a no fee account.

Veronica Mars fans will recognize “normal is the watchword”. We’re in the midst of a radical change to what used to be normal. And some of it will be painful. Some of it might be amazing. But we have a lot of discussions to have from Basic Income to better pay for everyone to whether or not we hug people. As the old adage says...

*Merriam- Webster defines pandemic (noun) as ‘an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population’ so i guess to answer my own question yes and no. A wide geographic area is not necessarily the globe. But it could be.

at what cost?

Someone posited a question on Twitter recently asking what was the worst thing about being single; I know she was looking for emotional and non tangible reactions, but my reaction was that the worst part was the cost.

According to North American statistics (read US because Stats Can isn’t collecting data right now – don’t get me started, it’s a mess) we have officially tipped the scales and now more than 50% of households are now single. This is historically significant. It is socially significant. And it makes me wonder if finally marketers might start to consider changing the way they vend based on this new information. Read small sizes, with proportional price tags.

It’s the old mayonnaise dilemma I have about once a year when I need mayonnaise. The half-sized jar is 30 cents less than the full sized jar, but I will toss out half of the full sized jar, but it’s so much more economical to purchase the larger container. In truth I generally wait until one of them is on sale and then purchase that one. But it leads to the same question. Why am I asked to pay the same rate for half the product just because I’m single (or can’t consume the volume of product in the larger container)? The obvious answer is just to purchase the larger container on the off chance that I might consume more and then I’m not in the position of paying more, but that leads to food waste, which leads to a whole other argument about consumption and here I am still standing in the grocery aisle with a ethical dilemma over a goddamned jar of mayonnaise.

The basics and fun of life are still designed for couples, or more than one person. Rent, well other than me, who has amazingly low rent - I live as if I have roommate in terms of dollars - but for everyone else, coming up with that sum of money every month can be challenging, especially if you’re a woman and still make 30% less on average than a man for no reason that makes any sense. Vacations, while not the basics of life, are not half the cost for a single person, because most of those advertised rates and deals are based on double occupancy. And then there’s the good old ‘because female’ rationale for why things like deodorant, shampoo, razors and other genderfied items are more when you’re a woman than they are when you’re a man. Marketplace ran a show on this.

Sure there’s value in volume and in some cases it makes sense. It doesn’t cost that much more to wrap plastic around 12 rolls of toilet paper than it does 4, so it makes sense to offer it in larger packages. And let’s face it, 4 toilet rolls isn’t going to last all that long, although on the flipside, the toilet roll storage basket in my teensy little bathroom holds exactly 12 rolls, so those monster 30 packs are virtually useless to me. Sure they don’t go bad, but in my surprisingly reasonable apartment, there is very little storage space, and no place to put them until I need them. Ok, ok, I have a freezer and I can take a bigger package of say chicken and wrap it up to freeze and use later. But what if it’s something I haven’t tried and I’d like to try it once before deciding to buy a 3 month supply. Or would like to only heat up half that frozen convenience lasagna so that I won’t be eating it for the next 7 days?!

But this goes beyond marketing and consumables. Let’s talk taxes. Under Harper, a new, albeit controversial, tax break is announced for families. Great if you qualify and you have a family. Sure you’re paying for things I don’t have to consider such as educating someone other than myself, but where’s the break for me joining a gym or taking an exercise class? Only for kids you say? Hmm. They aren’t any. None. You might be able to claim some of your portion of rent under Ontario tax benefits, but so can anyone regardless of marital status. Yes, you get the same crappy education tax breaks of any student, but you aren’t able to claim yourself as a dependent and it goes on. In fact an article in The Atlantic pegged this number in the US as being over $1 Million dollars more to be single over a lifetime. Read it because the numbers are astounding.

Why are these financial penalties for being single? (Which I totally stole from an interviewer on HuffPost.) The more I read on this subject the angrier I became and if you listen to this interview you can heard the opinion of women with much more knowledge of the subject than I have. I don't have a pithy ending statement for this one. I keep trying to form a sentence about considering as a society why we revere marriage so much and why can’t we extend similar privilege to single person households too, but we need to be at a point beyond consideration and be at a point of action.  Let’s start with taxes and work backwards from there.

your algorithm thinks i'm fat

If you're a Loblaw’s fan you've probably been participating in the new points program aimed at getting Loblaw’s and affiliates a massive amount of information about how you shop and eat.  And if you marry that with a PC MasterCard about how you do just about everything consumable. 

However that's not quite how they positioned it. Something about targeted offers, bonus points and meal and recipe suggestions all FOR YOU. The pay off though, points for free food make it worthwhile. Let's face it everything you do is being tracked anyway so why not get a perk or two.

I'm loyal to Loblaw’s for a lot of reasons - which we've discussed here before.  Among which is proximity to my home and a wide selection of mostly ready to eat things that I can eat without feeling like everything I ingest is takeout.  PC Blue has been a godsend in that at least one thing isn't totally horrible. (Read that fine print. That list is an 'or' list as in whole grain or low fat or low salt)

I know expecting a computer model to interpret complex human decision making processes is, in a word, inane. But I think your algorithm just told me I'm fat.

For the longest time I got recipes(!) - first poor assumption - for things I don't eat or do eat but never at home.  I like barbecued chicken but I don't own a barbecue and for some reason someone always leaves me a bottle of barbecue sauce which since I rarely use eventually gets tossed.

I got that recipe 4 times.

The soup recipe came in a heat wave in July.  I think I can safely say no one wanted soup.

The single steak I bought over the summer when a friend and I rented a cottage and I paid for groceries has resulted in many offers for beef and pork despite having never again purchasing any other red meat.  So the chicken bacon salad suggestion ain't gonna do it either. 

Finally, one day, perhaps after I bought all the ingredients for Turkey Bean chili did I get a winner.

So what can I surmise?  Well at a first blush. Loblaw’s your system needs some tuning.  And some work. Why can't I easily opt out of offers every week so the system can more quickly 'learn' my habits?  That is when I can even get to the site which 75% of the time is off line minutes after you send your weekly e-blast.

And finally why does someone with no cat keep getting offers for cat food?

it’s 2014; why is my mascara still running?

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s someone always posts a ‘what-we-predicted-for-the-future’ article.  It’s inevitable.  And usually the ideas presented for the present day, then the future, at that time are a strange mix of absolutely spot on and so horribly off base.

Whenever I consider the ‘future’, the images conjured are from 1982’s Blade Runner, which, if IMDB is correct was set in 2019, 5 years from now.  Floating dirigible restaurants that pull up to my moveable apartment wall, I don’t think so, but roving food trucks, well maybe, if Toronto Council will get over themselves!

There’s no Rosie the robot to clean our homes but robot vacuums, yes, which if you’re paying attention on youtube, are the favourite mobility device of the domestic cat.

Personal, portable computers, sure, and in several formats, but what are we doing with them?  Communicating yes.  Finding ways to entertain ourselves, sure.  But primarily because we’re all trapped in some sort of gridlock travelling back and forth between work and home because flying cars, streamlined transit and transporters never did materialize. 

And those devices; of which access to them is still determined by economics, meaning that educating children across economic status’ still isn’t a level playing field.

Food preparation.  If you want something decent, you still cook it.  And at my house on a gas stove that’s older than my parents.  Collecting said food, still done the old fashioned way, by going to the store and dragging it home because consumer friendly online shopping of the basics still isn’t with us in a real way. 

Online shopping – absolutely.  But delivery and returns still done via ‘snail’ mail, which is, in Canada at least, as we speak, being serviced out of existence.  And every password you use must be unique to the point of inertia.  My personal credit card password requires so many specific elements I cannot usually remember it for more than a day, and I don’t dare save it to my computer memory because the banking system isn’t hack proof.

In a lot of ways the human factor dictates how quickly we move away from known methods.  The truth is the tried and true often prevails even when it may not be the most ‘best’ way to go about something.  Landlines are still in use because when the power grid fails, and the cell networks go too, the old land line still works.  I see my friends less, but talk to them more because of social media, in fact I talk to people I don’t really know, if I’m honest because somehow the social of social media makes it possible for us to congregate.  And yet we have the highest level of single person households ever.  The future, the now, is bright, but it moves at the pace we can stand it. 

It’s all fascinating.  Some of it is digital.  But the real question is, since it’s 2014, why can’t they invent a decent mascara that does not run?

and there's that

What a difference a week, or probably a little longer in reality, makes.

According to the man himself the entire gentleman's deal went down in a van on a country road, which hopefully isn't as untoward as it sounds when you write it down.  The deal gets voted in or out in September but the deal for Loblaw to purchase Shopper's Drug Mart gives them not only an entirely new-ish market segment but also unprecedented urban locations.

So while the webesphere goes on about how 'expensive' these retailers are - not understanding that there is a fairly large group who are not willing to take transit out into the wilds of the 'burbs, walk across a massive parking lot to save 29 cents on a can of tuna - 'we' are wondering how exactly this will look.  However I admit that on those Friday nights when I don't want to cook and I'm standing in the freezer aisle of my local SDM I'm a little stoked that there might be some Blue Menu options.