Category Archives: Uncategorized

Minute Maid’s frozen juice ripoff

August 12, 2011 – 3:38 am| Posted in Business, Uncategorized

Old 355ml (right) and new 295ml Five Alive frozen juice can from Minute Maid

If, like me, you went to the grocery store recently and thought that frozen juice can felt a bit odd in your hand, it's not your imagination. Minute Maid has decided to reduce the size of its frozen juice cans as a cost-saving measure.

The move is, of course, not being announced. There's no obvious indication on the cans that their size has been reduced (the only real difference is that the logos have been rotated so they're upright when the can is standing), and at least one major grocery store isn't selling it for cheaper. On a trip to Loblaws last weekend, I confirmed that both the new and old size of can (the old ones were still in stock) were on sale at $1 each (the two have different bar codes, so it's not a technological limitation).

And, in case you're wondering, it hasn't just been ultra-concentrated like those liquid laundry detergents. They still recommend emptying the can's contents and three cans worth of water to mix the juice. So now instead of getting 1.42 litres of juice, you get 1.18 litres, a reduction of 17%

When asked about the change, Minute Maid (which is owned by Coca-Cola) said this:

"With the increase in commodities, rather than pass the total cost on to the consumer, the decision was made to adjust the package size to offset some of the increase the consumer would have had to pay if this adjustment wasn’t made."

I then asked why this change wasn't made clear to the customer. I didn't get a response.

Loblaws also didn't respond to a query about why it didn't make the change clear to customers and why it was charging the same for both sizes of can.

I can understand commodity prices, inflation and the increased cost of doing business. One could even make the argument that some of these frozen juices could stand to be diluted more, mainly for health reasons (I usually dilute them to a full 2 litres, and even then they're quite sugary). But households aren't going to reduce the size of their juice jugs or how much they drink, so this move seems strange to me.

Except when you consider how subtle it is. When you see it in the context of tricking the customer into buying less and expecting more, it all makes perfect sense: It's a ripoff.

At least a few posts on Minute Maid's Facebook wall (which is otherwise clogged with posts from people who joined under the apparently false impression that doing so would get them a coupon) agree. None of those posts got a response.

Minute Maid's brands include Five Alive, Fruitopia and Nestea. Other brands (including No Name, which is still at 341ml) are unaffected ... yet.

So if you're at the store and you're about to grab a Minute Maid concentrated frozen juice, check the can to see if it's actually smaller than you think it is. And if you see a 355ml can (especially if it's still on sale for $1), stock up, because they won't last.

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Broadcasting regulation nerdgasm

November 3, 2008 – 4:20 am| Posted in Uncategorized

The CRTC got real busy last week making some big announcements/decisions/suggestions about television broadcasting regulations. Many of them are boring, minor or technical, but here are a few that aren't:

Over-the-air carriage fees

The big one for broadcasting companies like Canwest/Global, CTV, TQS and Quebecor is the decision to reject the suggestion that "broadcast distribution units" (i.e. cable and satellite companies) should be required to pay fees to TV broadcasters who broadcast over the air freely.

This idea came out of the whole TQS saga, when the network's owners decided that it needed the ability to somehow blackmail cable companies into giving them money. Since cable specialty channels get per-subscriber fees in exchange for their content, shouldn't broadcast networks - whose budgets are supposedly higher because they need to produce local news - get money too?

The flip side of the coin is that these network broadcasters are broadcasting freely, using public airwaves. Cable and satellite companies are required by law to carry local broadcast channels on their basic packages. Subscribers don't get any added value from getting over-the-air stations on cable (except, perhaps, not having to deal with rabbit ears), so why should they have to pay for them?

The CRTC's decision was tough (emphasis mine):

CTVgm and Canwest proposed that any FFC only be made available if broadcasters meet monthly local programming requirements. However, they did not commit that the FFC, or any portion of it, would result in incremental spending on Canadian programming.

While OTA broadcasters have shown a recent decline in profitability, they, as other enterprises, might first look to their own business plans before making a request for increased revenue from the Commission. In the Proceeding, no business plans suggesting new sources of revenue were provided to the Commission. Neither the rationale for strategic initiatives by OTA broadcasters, such as recent major acquisitions, nor the basis for financing those initiatives or the impact of those initiatives on profitability were explained to the Commission at the public hearing.

The CRTC did cave on one point though: It said that so-called "distant signals" (e.g. CTV Vancouver for us Montrealers) should be able to "negotiate" carriage, in order to offset the trouble that this time-shifting business has caused. What that effectively means is that broadcasters can set rates for out-of-market broadcast stations and simply not allow their channels to be carried on other regions' cable networks unless they pay their fees.

Broadcasters are happy with the parts of the decision that give them money, and unhappy with the ones that don't. They're for less regulation in the broadcasting industry, but they want corporate socialism for the "ailing" over-the-air broadcasting sector.

Read More »

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Happy Birthday, National Post (sorry about your Toronto magazine)

October 28, 2008 – 5:53 pm| Posted in Uncategorized
National Post Page 1: October 27, 1998

National Post Page 1: October 27, 1998

If there's anything the National Post can cover brilliantly, it's the National Post. Yesterday, Canada's conservative voice turned 10 years old, and they're going all out with a special anniversary section on their website talking about how awesome they are.

Everyone and their cat is producing first-person retrospectives of how new and cool the Post was back in its time. Kirk Lapointe, who worked at the Post during its launch, also chimes in.

Among the other anniversary features:

The Post, naturally, also has a bunch of story ideas of questionable journalistic value or relevance, like talking to 10-year-olds about what it's like being 10 or a story about how Google's also 10 (they're like the Post, only not evil).

My take

Love it or hate it, journalists like myself always welcome new voices, and the Post is no exception. It was a bold new paper that took off with a bang. It had big design ideas, it gave a focus to opinion, often promoting such pieces to its front page, and it took some risks.

My biggest problem with the Post has always been its typefaces. Awful, awful fonts. Nothing annoys me about newspaper design more than bad fonts (except, perhaps, long blocks of all-caps text).

As an employee of another Canwest newspaper, whose profits are used in part to keep the money-losing Post afloat, there's perhaps a bit of resentment. But, like the Ferengi, it's cute and I'd hate to see it die.

Goodbye, Toronto

The news isn't all cheery though. Thanks to budget cuts (the Post is widely known as a financial black hole for Canwest), the paper has been forced to cut its Toronto magazine section. Some content will be incorporated back into the rest of the paper, but that still means cuts. (Insert joke here about the rest of the paper becoming the Toronto section of the National Post.)

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Want to work for the Journal?

September 3, 2008 – 2:23 am| Posted in Uncategorized

Catch pedophiles. Tailgate the transport minister. Discover the evils of being hired as an anglophone. Follow ceremonial appointments and complain about how they're so ceremonial.

Those are among the selling points, apparently, of being hired as a reporter for the Journal de Montréal. And if such ... let's call it "journalism" ... appeals to you (and you write well in French), you're in luck: Montreal's biggest newspaper is hiring.

Check your dignity at the door and send an application to Gazette turncoat traitor managing editor George Kalogerakis.

UPDATE: I see I'm not the only one to notice this.

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Worst. Kerning. Ever.

February 16, 2008 – 4:48 am| Posted in Uncategorized

Seen at the Berri-UQAM metro:

Horrible kerning

Horrible kerning (2)

Looking at the website of the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, I admit it's possible this comically awful kerning job was done on purpose. But if so, it looks silly.

And the fact they misspelled "québécois" inconsistently (note a missing accent on the second version), I'm thinking maybe Astral Media was just incompetent designing these ads.

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Concordian interviews Boisclair

February 12, 2008 – 3:02 pm| Posted in Uncategorized

The Concordian interviews André Boisclair, who recently started giving lectures on crisis management at Concordia as a teaching assistant under former Liberal Party activist John Parisella. It starts off with marketingese about how happy he is to teach there (in response to questions about the controversies surrounding his appointment) and then descends into a confrontational debate over whether sovereignists should teach at anglo universities:

Is coming to Concordia a sign that you're no longer a sovereignist?
What are you getting at?

Well, I don't know, a lot of people say that a sovereigntist might have rather chosen to go to Universite de Montréal or UQÀM to teach.
Why is that?

Well. Because they're French universities.
Are you defending the principle of segregation sir?

Boisclair also says pretty definitively that he's done with politics.

No word on whether he spent any time doing lines with CSU executives or checking out the stalls in the Hall Building's 8th floor men's bathroom (ok ok, that one was unfair).

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The Link profiles The Gazette

December 6, 2007 – 3:33 am| Posted in Uncategorized

The Link at Concordia has a feature article about CanWest and specifically The Gazette cutting staff in its newsroom. It includes an interview with Gazette editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips, who says the shift from print to online is a "cultural shock."

Though the article is unsurprisingly negative in tone, it provides quite a bit of insight into the situation at the paper, as well as what the future holds for print media in general.

A couple of things though:

  1. While The Gazette's lobby is very pretty and there are some shiny yellow surfaces, I doubt it's actually made of solid gold as the article implies.
  2. Sorry Mike Gasher, but "linkalism" is not a word.
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Reasonable information on reasonable accommodation

November 27, 2007 – 3:49 am| Posted in Uncategorized

La Presse has a myths vs. reality article on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation. It includes some enlightening figures about religion, immigration and language in this province.

Naturally, the facts make it clear that pur laine Quebecers don't have anything to fear from a few thousand immigrants.

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School boards: What will we do with them now?

November 7, 2007 – 4:10 am| Posted in Uncategorized

Now that school board elections are over, with absolutely atrocious voter turnout, the inevitable we-have-to-do-something leadership-by-hindsight begins.

Some of the options being considered:

Abolish school boards entirely: This is the ADQ's solution to the problem, and the excuse for reason why they want to force a real election. Administration of schools would fall to municipalities, the provincial government, and the schools themselves, removing a layer of bureaucracy. Unfortunately, as municipal mergers should have shown us, it's not that easy. The bureaucracy created by the change might be as large or even larger than the bureaucracy it's replacing.

Give school boards more power: For those (like me) who complain there aren't any issues to be decided here (things like school taxes and curricula are set by the Quebec government), this might make elections more interesting. But it would also make the boards inconsistent, and that could lead to problems down the road.

Tie school board elections to municipal elections: I can't see how this isn't a good idea. Let's reduce the amount of times we need to go out, update a voters' list and wait in line to cast our ballots.

Here's one I'd like to suggest adding to the list: Have school board commissioners appointed by municipalities instead of elected by the populace directly. This may sound anti-democratic at first, but the system it's replacing isn't perfect either. This solution would keep the bureaucracy as is, but the decisions about how local schools would be run would be left in part to the municipal governments they're in. (Municipal politics aren't high on voter turnout either, but it's better than school board elections -- and most people can name their mayor at least.)

Just a thought.

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Universities are cesspools of cronyism

October 17, 2007 – 3:45 pm| Posted in Uncategorized

Le Devoir has an op/ed today about university governance. In it, an executive at the university teachers' association talks about how university governing boards aren't representative of the teachers and students involved in the universities. Instead, they're filled with rich, connected businesspeople who buy their way onto them through donations to the universities.

The problem isn't so bad on paper. Universities reserve more than half the seats on their governing boards for members of the community. This can mean businesspeople, community leaders, people at other educational institutions, retired educational industry professionals, doctors, lawyers, etc.

The problem mainly lies in the fact that these seats are self-selecting. They're the highest governing bodies at their institutions, answerable only to the government, and so the boards basically control themselves. Nominations as members of the community are dealt with by a nominating committee of the board.

This causes two related problems: the people who are nominated tend to be friends or business associates of people already on the boards, and dissenting views get actively or passively shut out.

When I was at Concordia, I wrote a piece about the corporate connections of the members of Concordia's Board of Governors. A little bit of Google searching found a lot of associations between most of the members' companies. One acted as a lawyer for another. One serves on the board of the company whose CEO is the wife of another member. And so on.

In some cases, these associations are perfectly reasonable, having been formed after the two were appointed to the board together. But the chronology doesn't solve the problem that the fat cats are friends and do things together.

There's also other problems: These connected rich people tend to be more likely to receive honourary degrees, have buildings and academic programs named after them, or receive other official praise from the universities they're connected to, in exchange for their generous donations. (Technically, board memebrs can't receive honourary degrees while they're on the board, and paying for such degrees isn't allowed either. So we see a lot of anonymous donations, or PR people stressing that donations aren't made with strings attached. And degrees are handed out after people retire from the board.)

The government needs to step in and solve this problem with new rules. Representation from academics and students needs to be increased. More non-business types need to be brought in. Academic decisions need to be deferred to academic bodies. And tough conflict-of-interest rules need to be established.

Business leaders should be on boards of universities. They have experience running large organizations, and have a lot of expertise they're willing to share. But the power this gives them is very big, and it needs to be kept in check.

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