So now that Target has compromised your data, Walmart has it figured that
they are going to welcome you home. You can now expect an intrustion into
your Walmart shopping experience by an “interceptor”. Apparantly, Walmart
Canada has installed them into stores so that they can come up to you and
ask if you have yet received your free $25. Oh of course, they will simply
execute the “assumptive close” by asking your name for their application
form. You won’t know who they are, whether they are a third party promotion
company and you will certainly not be honored with an “excuse me” and a
formal introduction. In short, you will be ambushed.

I haven’t read it yet although it’s been available in the public domain for a week now.  Government bureaucrats are making serious dough and they don’t want you to know about it even though as Albertans – you pay their salary.  Not surprisingly, more than 300 folks in your government earn more than $100,000 per year.  They push paper, defer decisions, and scamper along cathedral halls with elevated chins in Henry Singer suits.  Oh yes….if there’s a whiff of relevance in a seminar trip to the tropics in February – they’ll be on that junket.  Suddenly everyone is Nelson Mandela’s old friend when he dies and Alberta needs “representation” half way around the world.  This positions these same folks to sit down with public sector unions and negotiate on behalf of me the taxpayer.  Have your roads been cleared yet here in February from the November snow fall?  Oh ya….it’s a municipal problem.  

They wanted your banking information yet you are a retail shopper.  American big box comes to Canada and thinks by tying your discount to your banking information they think they’ll turn you into a customer life.  Well, it’s all back fired for them and their paternalistic marketing ploy has been handed back to them on a silver platter.  Now they think they can still get you back by granting you one month of free credit monitoring because of their security breech.  What are you to think now?  I suppose if you haven’t closed your account by now you’ll take them up on it because you’ll have no control of ever gaining confidence that your information has been adequately destroyed and not disseminated.  However; if you have closed your account – in order for them to offer the credit monitoring service, won’t they be looking for more confidential data from you so they can fulfill this one year free service.  It’s all preposterous to me. 

Imagine all the retrofits across Canadian malls to accommodate this big box and now they’re potentially faced with consumer back lash.  We wanted big box and best price.  What we got has been poor service, bad management, parking gridlock at malls and shopping cart congestion. We put many aspiring business retail entrepreneurs into the driver’s seat of a taxi cab or the kitchen of a fast food joint and in the process produced a banal shopping environment whereby once it used to provide fuel for diversity and cultural distinctiveness. 

If fifty-five to sixty hours per week at work is becoming the norm as Mr. Luke suggests in his article “Longer hours, more stress:  The New Reality in the Canadian Workplace”, it’s time to really examine how this has come about.  There has been no time in history where we’ve had such tremendous access to new affordable technological tools to aid in productivity and efficiency – yet the work week grows.  I ask whose fault is it? Is it a fault?  Perhaps you prefer 60 hours over 40 and absenteeism from your cruise vacation, kid’s concert, second language development, ski trip to Panorama, child school tutoring, reading club commitment, pursuit in volunteerism, guitar class, Seahawks run for the Super Bowl (so excited this year),  is totally okay when making lifestyle compromises for the boss you love so much. 

I suggest if these are the hours you are working it’s because you are operating inefficiently at work or you have not learned to go home for dinner because of a sense of paranoia about what the boss will think.  I was lucky enough to learn in my mid twenties that no matter how much you give, they will ask for more and that “loyalty” in the work place is never reciprocated in a recession when suddenly the pink slips start to circulate.  All’s you can do is all you can do and this means offering helpful suggestions to management on how to work more effectively.  When advice from the production goes unheeded, there are consequences.  Should those consequences be your daughter on stage at recital without daddy in the audience? 

Your employer expects you to respond to a text at 7pm because you did it once before.  Now they know they can get away with disturbing your private time.  Your boss came to learn that you jump when that phone beep goes off at whatever time of the day.  Now in fact you even jump when walking through a cross walk.  It’s hard to blame the employer when folks have so readily compromised their personal autonomy.  Not you though, right?  

USA Today reports that there are now three job seekers for every job opening but with this moderately competitive market and very realistic opportunity to find work within 26 weeks for the unemployed, apparently some still think 26 weeks is not enough.  Since the recession of 2008 particular states offered workers up to 99 weeks to find a job.  If the unemployed cannot find a job, can they not find someone’s windows to wash?  Can the unemployed not find someone’s house to clean?  Can the unemployed not sell the house and take work serving coffee?  Can the unemployed not pick cotton, shovel snow, sell Avon, or perform a temporary project?  Can the unemployed not deliver flyers, drive a school bus or paint the neighbors kitchen?  If unemployed, somewhere along the line somebody did not want you, need you, or you did not want them.  Can you not go out and prove to a community you are deserving of work by working?  The American dream is premised by individual liberty and the rights of the individual to contract for services so why is it that this right is left open ended in lost opportunity? Perhaps your idiotic school system forgot to teach capitalism. 

Could Mitt Romney have been right during the election campaign of 2012 when stating “there are 47 percent who are with him (Obama), who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”  At the time I didn’t subscribe to Romney’s cynicism but I’m having second thoughts.  This endless bantering about extending unemployment benefits is just one more reason why responsible people are left frustrated by the madness in Washington and the climate which continues to perpetuate dependence at a time when debts and deficits are gargantuan, the financial system is in peril, and creditor nations loom like hawks awaiting America’s default.