Sutori - Stories Tagged With 'canada'

Guilty of Being Loyal?

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:45:15 -0700

Why is it that when you fly on points with Air Canada, they seem to want to make you feel guilty for doing so during the whole experience.

Despite it being plainly clear that you are a frequent flier (elite or super elite designation, usually), as soon as you have a reward ticket that means that all staff should be unfriendly, unhelpful, and overall generally indifferent to the fact that you are on this planet.

Why?

Shouldn't the reward travel experience be the best part? Shouldn't they give you free cookies, free upgrades (if available), and celebrate the fact that you earned this trip, earned it through dozens of horrible business flights through crazy itineraries, dirty airports, car rentals and long drives, etc.?

They gotta rethink it. I want to have fun on reward travel (usually holiday time). Traveled to Asia and they just made me feel worse and worse at every touchpoint... perhaps i should have apologized to the staff members for cashing in my miles?

Cobs bread makes every day delicious

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:27:30 -0700

If Cobs has come to your town, I'm probably preaching to the converted here. If not, let me explain.

First, a little history. Cobs Bread is a chain of bakeries that create really delicious versions of really basic day-to-day bread products. And sell them for really good prices. They are all over the Greater Vancouver area, with new ones opening all the time.

They are actually a Canadian-ized version of a chain that’s all over Australia and New Zealand called Baker’s Delight.

Before Cobs came along, I would buy most of my day-to-day breads at the supermarket. Nothing fancy. I’m talking about the pre-sliced stuff you make sandwiches with. Hamburger and hot dog buns during the summer months. That sort of thing.

If it was a special occasion, I would maybe go to one of the specialty bakeries in town and pick up something a little special.

But mostly it was the stuff I grabbed at the Safeway. This was always a very hit and miss proposition. It involved shifting through loaf after loaf squeezing and checking best-before dates. I was always changing brands in pursuit of the perfect loaf.

I was never satisfied. I usually ended up throwing half a loaf out at the end of the week.

Then along came Cobs.

Unlike those special occasion bakeries I used to visit--and still do on occasion--Cobs is all about the basics. They take the sliced supermarket loaf and turn it into something fresh-baked and mouth-wateringly tasty. And they charge LESS than the supermarket.

Genius, I tell you. Genius.

And to top it off, they're always located right across the street from giant supermarkets to make it nice and easy to add them on as a postscript to your weekly shop.

The do this thing called a “country grain flour loaf” that I never get tired of eating. I’m salivating just thinking about it. And their hot dog buns . . . damn!

The only drawback, if you can call it a drawback, is that they don’t use preservatives so the loaves don’t last long.

But we usually eat the whole thing before it has a chance to go bad.

MDG, the great white hype?

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 15:36:59 -0800

So other than having Steve Nash as their spokesperson, what good is MDG?!

I am sure a decent number of us in Canada have at least seen an ad or two on TV or in one of those free newspapers (e.g. Metro) for MDG products. They are essentially the poor-man's Dell Computers. I have never bought anything from them, but I have always been extremely tempted. The their prices are extremely low.

And there in lies the problem. The low-low prices I think can be a double edged blade. It's like Wal-mart; after a while people just naturally develop this opinion that the store is too cheap to be good.

And in the same vain I am somewhat skeptical of MDG. For one thing, the price of their computers and LCD TV's are always dropping. Honestly, every couple of weeks the prices will be lower by $40-$100. I mean sure it is enticing but after a while it's really going to hurt the company's image. People are going to start to think, is the quality of MDG products that shitty that they have to lower the price constantly? Is no one out there buying anything from MDG?

Secondly, I called their Vancouver branch recently, just on a whim after seeing a 32 LCD TV for only $899. And what type of service do I get? Seems like I was talking to some disgruntled employee who seriously hated his job. The MDG guy seemed to have a grudge against me right off the bat. He was like the soup-Nazi from Seinfeld. Every question I asked was answered with a series of gruff grunts.

Perhaps that's why their units are not flying off the shelves at such low-low prices ... no one can get past the salesperson on the phone!

So I guess this is not really a story and hopefully it's not too much of a rant. It's more of a question I want to put forth to my fellow Sutori goers.

Has anyone out there bought an MDG product? And if so what did you think? Does anyone here own an MDG LCD TV?

I am just wondering if MDG is a great white hype or something more ...

Air Miles, Aeroplan and the Myth of Free Flights

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:21:06 -0800

We’re planning a bunch of flights in the month of April. We’re departing Canada on April 18, and making several stops before settling into Malta on or about May 1.

My wife Julie has enough Aeroplan points to fly free, round trip, to Europe. I don’t have quite enough. We booked some of our flights this morning, and there was a ridiculous rigmarole to ensure that our seats were next to each other.

She booked on Aeroplan, I simultaneously booked on Air Canada, and then we immediately called Aeroplan to get her seat moved next to mine. That’s the prescribed strategy, and it’s absurd.

But that’s not really the subject of this post. My flight on Air Canada was about CAN $750. That’s quite a good price, in my experience. Julie’s ‘free’ flight, turned out to be a little over CAN $300. That’s three hundred bucks worth of fees and, I don’t know, ‘plane oxygen usage’ surcharges. $300 is, as you know, a lot more than free. I felt more than a little screwed.

I think we can all agree. Unless you can afford the glorious first class, air travel blows.