Jun. 27, 2019 "How do restaurants decide how much to charge?": Today I found this article by Karon Liu in the Star Metro. I really like this article, because it's about working at a restaurant, and the restaurant business:
Many diners will probably look at a restaurant’s menu and think, why pay $20 for a plate of chicken and vegetables when they could make the same dish at home for a fraction of the cost?
When opening a restaurant, figuring out how much to charge for food is more than just covering ingredient costs and then tacking on a few extra dollars as profit.
In reality it’s a detailed formula where every penny accounts for expenses such as labour and rent as well non-food details such as cleaners, napkins and music licensing.
But depending on the restaurant, how the breakdown works out differs.
A Hakka restaurant spends hundreds each month on the free tea given out to diners,
an ice cream shop walks the line between providing a good deal and increasing ingredient costs,
and a burgeoning restaurant empire has to adapt its menus to suit the different neighbourhoods and budgets around the city.
“A lot of people think it’s easy to open a restaurant. It’s anything but,” says Jeanette Liu, who runs Yueh Tung Restaurant in the Bay St. and Dundas St. W. area alongside her sister Joanna, their father Michael and mother Mei Wang. “My parents ran it for over 30 years and it’s a testament to their hard work. People think that restaurant owners aren’t intelligent and they’re just dumping plates on tables, but it takes a lot of brains.”
Yueh Tung is in a peculiar, but not uncommon situation when it comes to food pricing for what’s considered an “ethnic” restaurant in North America.
The expectation is that the food must be cheap and in big portions, even if the restaurant is spending upwards of $40,000 on vegetables and anywhere between $60,000 to $100,000 on meat every month.
And being in a prime downtown core location, rent is $30,000 a month (it was around $1,000 back in the 80s).
To pay for all that with a $10.50 plate of chili chicken is a daunting task.
“Our margins are very slim, but thankfully we do large volumes.
Thirty to 40 per cent of every dish should be your food costs,
another 30 to 40 per cent goes to labour,
and then 10 per cent for rent and other costs,”
says Joanna Liu.
“After all of that, if you’re lucky, the profit margins are two to five per cent.”
She breaks down one of their most popular dishes, two whole lobsters wok-fried in ginger and green onion, a staple menu item at most Chinese restaurants. The restaurant charges $55 for it. At the time, the lobster cost $13 per pound (it typically ranges between $11 and $15), so for two one-and-a-half pound lobsters, the cost of the lobsters alone is $39.
She estimates the aromatics (ginger, green onion and Spanish onion) cost about $1.20 per order, but that doesn’t include basic ingredients such as salt, pepper, oil and other spices.
The remaining $14.80 must cover the cooks and waitstaff, as well as electricity and gas to power up the kitchen before the restaurant sees any profit.
If it’s for takeout, 49 cents to a dollar goes towards things such as utensils (five cents for a pair of chopsticks), hot sauce (15 cents) and its container (two cents), food containers (23 cents) and napkins (two cents each, or about $4500 in total for a year’s worth of napkins).
“Some days we honestly make nothing on our lobsters but we keep it on the menu because of the demand,” she says, adding if it’s taken off the menu they risk losing customers.
In terms of labour,
one cook butchers the lobster,
another batters and fries it,
and then a third cook tosses it in a wok with the aromatics.
Then a server takes the dish out to the table and later cleans the table when the guests leave,
and a dishwasher cleans the plate.
All in all, that one plate of lobster went through the hands of five staffers that all need to be paid.
Variable costs include phone bills, website maintenance and wifi.
Each time a customer pays with debit or credit cards, the restaurant also pays a service fee to use the machines (that money also goes towards paying for a card’s benefits and rewards).
To reduce fees, some restaurants require diners to spend a minimum amount in order to pay with a card or offer discounts to diners who pay with cash.
There are also parts of the dining experience at Yueh Tung that customers seldom notice: cleaners every three weeks, carpet washers every three months, filters for the air system as well as the “freebies” that diners expect from a Chinese restaurant: fortune cookies and oolong tea, which costs the restaurant $300 for a two month supply of leaves.
The restaurant recently made the tough call to only serve tea when diners asked for it. “If we put it on the table, it either makes people not want to order other drinks or they don’t drink it and we have to throw it out,” says Jeanette Liu. “It was a big decision. It’s OK so far but we thought we would lose business over it.”
Yorkville’s Mediterranean-inspired Bar Reyna also stopped offering bar snacks at no additional charge because it was resulting in food waste and cutting into the restaurant’s bottom line, says owner Nicki Laborie. For her, she also follows the common rule that a dish’s ingredient should cost about 30 per cent of what a restaurant charges. There are exceptions, however.
“We had an octopus dish that I had to take off the menu,” she says. “When the supplier makes it $5 more per pound, you can’t just absorb that cost and I don’t want to offer octopus for $45. But for our zucchini fritters, the food cost is less so we can make more profit on that to balance out another dish on the menu where the ingredients cost more.”
At Laborie’s second restaurant, Reyna, a food stall inside the Assembly Chef’s Hall in the Financial District, management wanted all the stalls to have similar prices that would appeal to the lunchtime crowd.
“It’s all about portioning,” says Laborie. “The Bar Reyna salad at Yorkville is $18 but at Assembly we offer a smaller version that’s ready for takeout and priced lower. The overhead at Assembly is much lower because there’s no table service so we can charge less.”
Laborie recently opened a third restaurant, Reyna On King, in Corktown with most of the menu items under $12 to cater to a more residential neighbourhood. The advantage of having multiple restaurants, she says, is that they can spread out the costs. On one night, Reyna on King was quiet while its sister Yorkville location was getting slammed so Laborie sent buckets of already prepared fries from the King East restaurant to Yorkville. Not only does this cut down on the extra labour required to prep more food at the busier location, it also prevents unsold food from having to be thrown out.
“I’ve been in this business for 25 years and this is what you do when you design a menu,” says Laborie. “A food cost for one dish can be 50 per cent but another can be 15 per cent, so overall you want food costs to be 30 per cent of operating costs.
The bar, which is liquor and wine, should be 20 to 25 per cent of over all costs. It used to be 30 per cent payroll but now it’s 35 to 45 per cent, which threw a wrench into things. The remaining 20 per cent goes into rent, marketing, decor and flowers.”
While Yueh Tung and the three restaurants in the Bar Reyna family have to deal with ordering vegetables, seafood and meat, calculating food costs is also a delicate balance for a seemingly simple concept like an ice cream store.
East Chinatown’s Wong’s Ice Cream earns 80 per cent of its revenue during the summer months, says owner Ed Wong. A scoop costs $4.75, but not every flavour costs the same to make. Like Laborie, Wong says the key to designing a menu is to have a mix of items that have a higher profit, and more specialty items that while have a higher food cost, which will draw customers in, such as his black sesame and salted duck egg ice cream.
“It’s no coincidence that the more popular flavours happen to be the more expensive ones to produce,” says Wong. “When you make ice cream the way we do, a lot of it is made by hand. Our coconut mango sticky rice is more difficult to make because the rice has to be cooked, the mango is swirled in, it has to be heated then chilled. It’s a two day process.”
He says that food costs, in particular the price of dairy, have steadily gone up in the last two years (seven per cent in the last year), resulting in him having to raise the price of a scoop to its current price of $4.75 from $3.80 when he opened.
“You have to increase your price or else it’s coming out of your pocket but there’s a fear of driving away your customer base,” he says.
“There will be a point when you can’t get enough customers to make a profit.
We certainly want to be paid fairly but also provide a good value and experience.”
Wong admits that the amount he pays himself fluctuates. After all, an ice cream shop is extremely weather dependent: if he expects a sunny weekend but it ends up raining, he still has to pay his staff for the shifts they were scheduled for even if they sell a fraction of what was expected.
“Customers may not think that they’re paying for anything else but the scoop, but the money also goes into the person that served them, the space, everything gets factored into the experience of being there,” says Wong.
Apr. 21, 2017 "A day in the life of a food vendor": Today I found this article by Teial Rao in the Globe and Mail:
It’s 6 on a Wednesday morning, and Kabir Ahmed has snoozed his alarm one too many times. He steps softly, barefoot, around his small, second-story apartment in Jamaica, Queens, creaking through the green and pink hall.
He is late, but careful not to wake his wife and their three children, or his mother, who will be up in an hour to say prayers and cook breakfast. He puts on his baseball hat, slides his feet into rubber clogs and hurries out without coffee.
Mr. Ahmed, 46, is in the business of chicken and rice. He immigrated from Bangladesh 23 years ago, and is now one of two partners in a halal food cart that sets up on Greenwich Street close to the World Trade Center, all year long, rain or shine.
He is also one of more than 10,000 people, most of them immigrants, who make a living selling food on the city’s sidewalks: pork tamales, hot dogs, rolled rice noodles, jerk chicken.
These vendors are a fixture of New York’s streets and New Yorkers’ routines, vital to the culture of the city. But day to day, they struggle to do business against a host of challenges:
byzantine city codes and regulations on street vending,
exorbitant fines for small violations (like setting up an inch too close to the curb)
and the occasional rage of brick-and-mortar businesses or residents.
Not to mention the weather,
the whims of transit and foot traffic,
and the trials of standing for hours, often alone,
with no real shelter or private space.
“What’s hard about this job?” Mr. Ahmed says. “Everything is hard. If I get old, I can’t do it anymore.”
The work is both demanding and routine. Mr. Ahmed commutes five or six days a week, clocking eight-hour shifts.
His ride into Lower Manhattan is just over an hour, so if he can find a seat on the E train, he sleeps, squashed between the bodies of strangers, or watches part of a movie on his phone.
Last week it was “Asoka,” based on the life of an Iron Age Indian ruler, played by one of his all-time favorite actors, Shah Rukh Khan.
But today, Mr. Ahmed checks his email first, hoping for news from one of the preschools processing the application of his youngest child, Karen. Nothing yet.
By 7:15 a.m., he has reached his usual spot, which he found three years ago by word of mouth: a wide swath of sidewalk in front of the BNY Mellon building that gets hectic around noon when those in the financial district crowd — a mix of Wall Street bankers and construction workers, students and tourists — are all looking to spend $5 or $6 on a fast, hot lunch.
Though there are occasional turf wars among vendors, Mr. Ahmed has never had to fight for space. He buys breakfast — a coffee and doughnut — from a nearby vendor who gives him what Mr. Ahmed calls a “neighbor discount.”
“Good morning, neighbor!” is his standard, sunny greeting for the half-dozen other carts on his block.
Like many cart owners, Mr. Ahmed hires someone to deliver the cart to him every morning and return it to a garage each night. (Other owners hitch the carts to their cars and drive them in, then face the ordeal of finding a parking spot.)
But by 7:40, Mr. Ahmed is getting antsy; the driver is late. “Maybe he has a flat tire,” he says. He stays calm, though sometimes he can’t help but imagine the worst. Mr. Ahmed was a New Yorker on 9/11, and this part of the city holds meaning for him. “Many people, they went to work like me, they thought it was an ordinary day,” he says.
It’s cloudy and cold for April, and Mr. Ahmed is still sleepy, but he won’t be tempted by the hot jolt of a second coffee. He knows he can’t leave the cart to go to the bathroom (at the Target across the street, or the Whole Foods a few blocks away) until his partner shows up hours from now. Another coffee, this early in the day, would be way too risky.
The driver pulls up with Mr. Ahmed’s cart at 7:52, and the two men work quickly to wheel it into place. Inside, the cart is cold, clean and packed with boxes of ingredients.
The food comes from a commissary kitchen attached to the garage in Long Island City, Queens; the city requires that food carts be serviced and supplied by a commissary, and there are many of them, of varying sizes, with different owners, all around New York.
At an extra cost, this one has provided everything Mr. Ahmed needs for the day: heads of lettuce, a few dozen tomatoes and potatoes, ready-sliced halal lamb, several bags of boneless chicken thighs, two 12-pound bags of basmati rice, four large plastic containers of potable water for cooking and washing, clamshell containers and napkins.
Mr. Ahmed ties on his apron and pushes a few boxes underneath the cart so he can squeeze inside and get to work. Any boxes peeking out beyond the cart’s footprint could result in a fine (penalties can run up to $1,000), as could parking his cart closer than six inches to the curb, or 20 feet to the building entrance. Mr. Ahmed knows all the rules by heart.
He connects the 40-pound propane tank and turns on the flattop grill and burners. He cuts lettuce and tomatoes, browns lamb and vast amounts of chicken. He takes care, in the cramped kitchen space, to keep his vegetarian cooking separate. For a long time, Mr. Ahmed chops onions in silence.
“If I play music or anything, I get distracted,” he says. “I forget the salt.”
Although Mr. Ahmed had little cooking experience when he started, his wife, Sheren Akter, says his food is better than that at most other carts — less greasy, more flavorful, well seasoned.
His menu consists of about 20 dishes, most of them cooked to order, but regulars know to ask for the chicken biryani, flecked with fried onion and cilantro, garnished with half a hard-boiled egg, all for $6, with a drink. He’d like to raise the price, but worries that he would lose customers.
Mr. Ahmed’s son, Kowshik, who dreams of working for NASA, will be a high school senior in the fall, and Mr. Ahmed wants all his children to go to college. “But now I cannot get sick,” Mr. Ahmed says, “and I cannot stop working.”
At 3:30 p.m., Mr. Ahmed’s shift ends and he walks back to the subway; his partner will stay until the cart closes at 8.
By now, Mr. Ahmed’s feet are sore and his back is aching. Lately, his back is always aching. The F train is delayed, but Mr. Ahmed, who likes to keep up on all the latest memes, and has been deprived of internet access for the duration of his shift, doesn’t mind. He passes this time catching up on funny videos.
Three times, he watches a 2015 clip of a 102-year-old woman who intends to blow out her birthday candles but instead sends her false teeth flying out onto the cake. People on the platform turn to stare as Mr. Ahmed belly-laughs, nearly weeping with delight. On the train, he learns that a preschool has accepted his daughter.
By 5, he is home, where he makes a few phone calls and takes a shower. Ms. Akter, who works part time as a cashier at a nearby Key Food, is also home. She makes a pot of coffee and warms up the food that Mr. Ahmed’s mother cooked earlier: beef curry, potatoes in broth, shredded bitter melon sautéed with onions, a cucumber and tomato salad, and two kinds of rice.
It’s a feast, set up on the narrow table in the living room, where a soap opera plays on TV. As they catch up, Karen climbs onto the sofa to snuggle, and Ms. Akter fixes her hair.
After work on Fridays, Mr. Ahmed goes to mosque, but not today. In just a few hours, it will be time to watch the news, turn in and start it all again.
Every year, they save money so Ms. Akter can take the children to visit relatives in Dhaka in the summer. But last week, she suggested that they plan a Caribbean cruise for the six of them instead. Mr. Ahmed didn’t think they could afford that kind of vacation, not to mention so much time away from his cart.
But riding the E train today, peeling potatoes, changing out the empty propane tank, he’d been thinking about it all the same. What would it be like to go on a cruise, he wondered. To board a big ship with your family, to vacation as they do in the movies, to fall asleep at night without setting an alarm.
My opinion: I feel sorry for him. He is working so hard to support himself and his family.
These are one of the reasons why I never want to have kids because of the financial pressure.
This job as a food vendor is hard and stressful.
Jul. 1, 2019 "On call, off balance": I found this article by Seres Lu in the Globe and Mail on Sept. 7, 2015. I tried to find the article on the internet, and it's not there.
I wrote down that the GAP, Sears, TJX Canada (Winners and Homesense), Ambercrombie and Fitch, and Victoria's Secret don't have on-call shifts.
Jan. 30, 2024 Restaurants at colleges and universities: Today I passed my resumes at the fast food places at the University of Alberta. The SUB building was busy. The HUB mall had some stores and restaurants closed down.
However, it was not as quiet with a lot of closed down restaurants and stores like in downtown.
This week's theme is about working at restaurants:
"Restaurateurs split on minimum wage hike"/ "Why this coffee shop owner started paying his staff a living wage"
"Service industry, retail employers frustrated by job interview 'no shows'"/ "Fast food restaurants recruiting more senior citizens"
My week:
Jan. 25, 2024 "Georgia's stolen children: Twins sold at birth reunited by TikTok video": Today I found this article by Fay Nurse and Woody Morris on BBC: This is a crazy story, but babies being stolen and/ or separated at birth does happen. I read stories like this.
Amy and Ano are identical twins, but just after they were born they were taken from their mother and sold to separate families. Years later, they discovered each other by chance thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video. As they delved into their past, they realised they were among thousands of babies in Georgia stolen from hospitals and sold, some as recently as 2005. Now they want answers.
For the past two years they have been building a picture of what happened. As they unravelled the truth, they realised there were tens of thousands of other people in Georgia who had also been taken from hospitals as babies and sold over the decades. Despite official attempts to investigate what happened, nobody has been held to account yet.
The story of how Amy and Ano discovered each other starts when they were 12.
Amy Khvitia was at her godmother's house near the Black Sea watching her favourite TV programme, Georgia's Got Talent. There was a girl dancing the jive who looked exactly like her. Not just like her, in fact, identical.
"Everyone was calling my mum and asking: 'Why is Amy dancing under another name?'" she says.
Amy mentioned it to her family but they brushed it off. "Everyone has a doppelganger," her mother said.
Seven years later, in November 2021, Amy posted a video of herself with blue hair getting her eyebrow pierced on TikTok.
Two hundred miles (320km) away in Tbilisi, another 19-year-old, Ano Sartania, was sent the video by a friend. She thought it was "cool that she looks like me".
Ano tried to trace the girl with the pierced eyebrow online but couldn't find her, so she shared the video on a university WhatsApp group to see if anyone could help. Someone who knew Amy saw the message and connected them on Facebook.
Amy instantly knew Ano was the girl she had seen all those years ago on Georgia's Got Talent.
"I have been looking for you for so long!" she messaged. "Me too," replied Ano.
Unable to have children, Amy's mother says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital. She would need to pay the doctors but she could take her home and raise her as her own.
Ano's mother was told the same story.
Neither of the adoptive families knew the girls were twins and despite paying a lot of money to adopt their daughters, they say they hadn't realised it was illegal. Georgia was going through a period of turmoil and as hospital staff were involved they thought it was legitimate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68055420
My opinion: This reminds me of the Jul. 2009 when I met this guy Mark and I told him he looks like this actor Kyle Gallner. He tells me he looks like the guy from the Dell commercials (Ben Curtis.)
Kyle Gallner:
Ben Curtis:
This is from my Jul. 2009 blog post:
news/ crazy meeting/ Harper's Island
writing/ Kris Andrews/ look alike
This is from my Aug. 2009 blog post:
Ben Curtis/ The Listener/ Fighting
This is from my Nov. 2009 blog post: This reminds me of how I met a guy who likes Channing Tatum.
Channing Tatum lookalike/ fable/ funny advice
This is the Feb. 2012 blog post:
PYT/ Channing Tatum look alike/ compliments
Jan. 23, 2024 "Mark Ruffalo waited until after his wife gave birth to tell her he had a brain tumor: ‘I just couldn’t’":
Today I found this article by Brie Stinson on Yahoo. I like this article because Ruffalo had a dream and intuition that told him about his brain tumor:
Mark Ruffalo said he found out he had a brain tumor more than 20 years ago when his wife was nine months pregnant with their first child.
"I had a brain tumor after the success of ‘You Can Count on Me,’" the 56-year-old actor told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the "Smartless" podcast Monday. "It’s the craziest thing. I was actually shooting ‘The Last Castle’ with [James] Gandolfini and Robert Redford and I had about a week left on that."
The "13 Going on 30" actor said he had a 4 a.m. call to be on set and "I woke up probably around three and I just had this crazy dream, you know, it wasn’t like any other dream I ever had. It was just like, ‘You have a brain tumor.’ It wasn’t even a voice. It was just pure knowledge: ‘You have a brain tumor, and you have to deal with it immediately."
He said he had no symptoms other than an ear infection, but he decided to go to the cast doctor anyway and told her, ‘Listen, this is going to sound crazy, but I had this dream last night that I have a brain tumor’ and she said, ‘That is crazy, but there’s no reason you should have to worry about it. I’ll order you a CAT scan, and we’ll go right after work today, and we’ll show how crazy you are."
Ruffalo went to the neurologist’s office to read the scan later, and "the nurse calls the doctor out, and I could hear them talking in the other room, and she just comes in, and she’s a zombie, and she says, ‘You have a mass behind your left ear the size of a golf ball, and we don’t know what it is. We can’t tell until it’s biopsied.’"
https://ca.style.yahoo.com/mark-ruffalo-waited-until-wife-232053832.html
Jan. 14, 2024 "“American Idol” Alum William Hung's Marriage Imploded amid His Gambling Addiction. How He Survived Rock Bottom“ ”(Exclusive)": Today I found this article by Gillian Telling on Yahoo. I like this article because it's about how he overcame obstacles:
"In this situation, very few people can stay on top for long," he says of viral fame. "So after a little while, I thought, I don't want to waste my life, so I went back to school, finished my degree and looked for a stable job. That was OK with me. I'd already gotten more out of American Idol than I ever could have expected."
After earning a degree and MBA in mathematics, Hung took a job at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, where he worked as a statistical analyst. "I like data, playing with numbers and computers, so it was something I enjoyed," he says.
But another career was calling.
"I quit my job three years ago and became a professional poker player," he says with a laugh. "I'd been doing it on the side for a while, and I decided maybe I was good enough to go for it. I was earning way more doing that than I was at my regular job. It was going well for a while."
And then it came crashing down.
"Unfortunately I developed a gambling addiction," he says. "I knew I was good at poker, but then I got greedy. I got into sports betting. The whole gamut. I know better [now]. I wasn't supposed to do those things, but I did it anyway," he says. "And I paid for it. I got divorced, and I learned I had to be smart about which risks I chose to take."
He married his third wife Hannah last year and decided to go back to his old job analyzing data for the Sheriff's Department.
My opinion: I told my little brother P about this, and he knew about Hung working for the Sheriff's Department.
Jan. 28, 2024: "Older Adults Are Confessing Their Biggest Regrets From Their 20s And 30s, And It'll Pull At Your Heartstrings": Today I found this article on Yahoo:
7."I think I regret not pushing myself harder in school. I honestly never prepared for the future. I remember time and again people would ask where you see yourself in five years; at the time, I probably would have sarcastically said at the bar or club. Sadly, as I lived to party, I never thought how important a great education, a good job, and a decent lifestyle is and not struggling all the damn time."
"Prepare now because the future is just around the corner. Better yourself, and spend more hours CARING about your studies and less about partying. It'll be the biggest and hardest challenge ever."
—dragoneye402
And finally...
15."For every regret, there’s a 'but then.' I wish I hadn’t taken out that student loan. But then, I wouldn’t have gone to the exact college I did, where I met my best friends that I still have 25 years later. I wish I never had that awful job. But then, I was driven to start my own company because of how much I hated that job. There are things I could have done, but maybe if I did them, I wouldn’t live in this exact town at this exact time with my exact husband and kids."
"Don't waste time on regrets. Love your friends and family (chosen or not). Find out what makes you happy. Be kind."
—katetapley
My opinion: This article reminds me of my blog posts.
Tracy's ideal life (as a TV writer & producer, Actor, Office Career) vs. Tracy's real life (Part 1)
Tracy's ideal life vs. Tracy's real life (Part 2)/ "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" by Adam Phillips
Lessons:
1. I would rather try really hard and a lot for a long time to achieve my goal, and not succeed than not try at all and wonder "What if?"
I don't regret that my script never got produced, because I tried to get it produced intensely for 5 yrs (2008-2012). Also to a lesser extent 2013-2014.
It's important to live a life without regret.
Sept. 23, 2021:
"If I don't pursue this, I'll always regret it." -Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See. "Powerful prose" by Ellen Schwartz
Costco Connection magazine Oct./ Nov. 2021
2. Go after what you want and with all your time, effort, and money.
3. Follow your passion.
4. There is an abundance of different jobs in the industry you want to work in.
Jan. 28, 2024 "Edmonton Downtown Farmers Market Association to declare bankruptcy, dissolve": Today I found this article by Nicholas Frew and Emily Fitzpatrick on CBC. My big sister S came and visited us and she told us about it.
Tracy: What? I was there a few months ago.
S: Well they're closing it this weekend.
The Edmonton Downtown Farmers Market Association will declare bankruptcy and dissolve, following a vote Saturday morning.
The decision comes a week after the association announced the farmers market would be moving from its historical building, located on 97th Street and 103rd Avenue, amid financial woes.
"It has been a long journey of painful financial issues and wondering if we should continue," said Elaine Doucette, market manager of the Edmonton Downtown Farmers Market.
The farmers market, which was an outdoor seasonal market, moved indoors in 2019, leasing a 113-year-old building downtown.
But higher utility costs — especially during wintertime — and consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic and safety concerns in downtown, such as fewer vendors and less foot traffic, resulted in dire financial straits.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-downtown-farmers-market-dissolving-1.7097161
Jan. 30, 2024 "Watch Me Lose My Job on TikTok": Today I found this article by Yiwen Lu on Yahoo and the New York Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — “I am about to get laid off,” Folashade Ade-Banjo spoke to the camera while positioning her phone, “and you are about to see it.”
In a five-minute TikTok video this month, Ade-Banjo, 30, a Los Angeles marketing professional, was shown sitting quietly at her desk and staring at her computer, a pained look on her face as she nodded that she was ready to start. She was being laid off by a tech giant. The video racked up a half million views and thousands of comments within hours.
“One of my resolutions for this year was to be a lot more open and honest with things I struggle with in my own life, so part of that is really showing parts of my life that may not be as glamorous,” Ade-Banjo said in an interview.
Some workers say they are using the videos to process the emotions of losing their job. Joni Bonnemort, 38, of Salt Lake City, filmed herself crying as a credit repair company laid her off from her marketing job in April. She planned to share the video only with her family but posted it to TikTok after finding out that the company had paid out bonuses to the remaining staff a week after conducting layoffs. The video racked up more than 1.4 million views and supportive comments.
“I wasn’t going to come off bitter like an exposé, but at the same time, it’s my experience,” Bonnemort said. “This happened to so many people.”
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/watch-lose-job-tiktok-125223432.html
My opinion: I was surprised that people film themselves at this bad time in their life. This is really personal and private. I write about all these job interviews I attend and I don't get hired. I rarely write the company name.
This is from Oct. 2023:
job interviews/ romance scams/ crazy car accident story
https://badcb.blogspot.com/2023/10/job-interviews-romance-scams-crazy-car.html
Jan. 31, 2024 "Quebec minimum wage rises by 50 cents to $15.75 an hour starting May 1": Today I found this article on BNN Bloomberg. This is good news:
The department says the hike will affect just over 200,000 workers, including more than 111,000 women.
Labour Minister Jean Boulet says the government doesn't want to raise the minimum wage too quickly because doing so could have a negative effect on employers, notably in restaurant and retail.
Feb. 1, 2024 "Consumers look to Value Village for a bargain. Many are finding 'ridiculous' markups": Today I found this article by Nisha Patel on CBC news. There are these pictures of items priced $3 from Dollarama. Value Village puts the price tag as $9.
There are a lot of comments criticizing Value Village.
"HMV making comeback through Toys 'R' Us locations": Today I found this article by Tara Deschamps on CTV news:
A blast from the past is coming to Toys "R" Us Canada.
HMV, the entertainment brand that departed the country seven years ago, said this week that it has begun selling merchandise in five of the toy retailer's Ontario locations. The rollout will continue across other Toys "R" Us Canada locations this spring, it said.
Products for sale in the HMV-branded sections include CDs, DVDs, vinyl, record players and other collector items like T-shirts and books.
At the time, owner Doug Putman told The Canadian Press that it is "unlikely, but definitely possible" that he would resurrect the brand in Canada, where 102 HMV stores were shuttered in 2017.
No comments:
Post a Comment