Driving away a customer

Recently, the Movie Gallery store near my house shut down. I was disappointed, because they occasionally called me to offer me free movie rentals. So when I went to rent a movie recently I had to check out other nearby stores.

I went to Rogers Plus, found a movie I wanted to rent, and went to sign up for a membership. The guy informed me that memberships cost $10 per year, but by renting or buying movies there I'd earn points. It would take 15 rentals (or less purchases) to earn enough points to earn back the $10. I'm guessing I don't rent 15 movies per year, especially now that I have a girlfriend. (Now I'm at home alone less often on weekends.) So I left the movie on the counter, said, "I'm not renting this," and walked out of the store.

Then I went to Blockbuster. They had the same movie there, and they didn't make me pay $10 for a membership. They had an optional rewards program that cost $10, but they didn't make me sign up for it.

I wonder if Rogers' $10 program is optional. If it is, their employee sure didn't do a good job of making that clear. If I misunderstood him, I would think he would've figured it out when I changed my mind about renting the movie. Or maybe he gets paid commission for everyone he signs up for that program, so he didn't want me to think it's optional. If that's the case, it backfired. Maybe it didn't hurt him any more than if I'd just rented the movie without signing up, but it hurt his employer. I'll probably never rent a movie there unless they tell me that the $10 program is optional.

I learned something at Canadian Tire!

Most Canadians know how hard it can be to find someone to help you at Canadian Tire, but as I discovered this week, the people they do have there sometimes know stuff that I don't. I'm not much of a handyman; I know there are lots of people who know more about fixing stuff than I do; I just didn't know Canadian Tire hired those people.

I was trying to pick out a replacement flapper for one of my toilets and I had a couple questions. While I was talking to an employee (who seemed to be in a rush to stop talking to me), he told me that if a flapper leaves black marks on my hands, it's rotting through and needs replacement. I'd already confirmed that the toilet is leaking by putting some food colouring in the tank and then checking the colour of the water in the bowl a while later, and this confirmed it's leaking. But now that I know this thing about the black marks, I have extra confirmation that it's leaking.

Good job Canadian Tire! Now go and hire more of these people.

Peanut butter

I bought peanut butter today.

Is that the most exciting opening line in the history of this blog?

I noticed two kinds of Kraft peanut butter side by side: the regular kind, and the unsweetened, unsalted kind. I had a look at the nutritional information and found that the big print really wasn't the whole story, but I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise. The unsweetened, unsalted stuff had more fat (including more saturated fat) and a few more calories than the regular stuff. Sure, it had no sugar or sodium, but the regular stuff only had 1 gram of sugar and 75 mg of sodium (3% of the recommended daily intake) per serving.

Unless you're extremely sensitive to salt or sugar, or you eat copious amounts of peanut butter, I don't think buying unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter will make much difference in your low sugar, low salt diet. And based on the number of calories, I'd say the extra fat more than compensates for the lack of sugar.

Sweatshops

For a while, I've been wondering where I could find ordinary, casual clothing that wasn't produced in sweatshops. I can't just look for a "Made in Canada" label anymore because those are so hard to find (not that I did look for those labels when they were easier to find).

Recently, I got an email from Mountain Equipment Co-op saying they'd released their 2007 Accountability Report. I knew they try to get their products from ethical sources, so I decided to learn more by reading Chapter 3: Manufacturing MEC-Brand Products. The report comes across as an honest assessment. There are problems in many of the factories where they get their products, but they're working to improve things. And the Ethical Trading Action Group ranked MEC 2nd out of clothing brands in North America. Not too shabby.

Which company was in first place, you may wonder? Reebok. I was kind of surprised to see that. I expected MEC to have a high ranking because it's a co-op that isn't so profit-focused, but Reebok seemed like a pretty ordinary company with no big efforts to promote its ethical standards. I think I'll be a bit more likely to buy Reebok clothing in the future.

I ended up visiting the website where this ranking came from and I searched for "Reebok". In my brief search, I didn't find the full rankings, but I did see that Nike and The Gap ranked high too. I thought these were some of the worst offenders. Apparently they got decent marks because they are starting to report on problems at their factories and they're making efforts to improve things. I wonder if Reebok is in a similar boat.

Free samples

I was at Superstore today and they were giving out free samples of some food. That never seems to happen at that store.