Rod McQueen's Blog, page 54

New look, same old prices

I have seen the future and it is Wal-Mart. I wrote that sentence while living in the U.S., just before Wal-Mart arrived in Canada in 1994. There’s no question that Wal-Mart has altered the face of Canadian retailing. Within two years, Wal-Mart became the biggest retailer in Canada with about one-quarter of the department store market share.

I spent hours watching the inner workings of Wal-Mart at the time, attending internal meetings and interviewing senior people. Wal-Mart succeeded mostly because employees on the floor run the supply chain with handheld devices that can call up inventory levels and have the power to replenish.

My reporting on the arrival of Target isn’t as in depth; all I’ve done is visit the new Target at Cloverdale Mall. That’s all I needed to do. The interior layout is way better than Wal-Mart. Target is well-lit, airy, enjoys wide aisles – and most importantly – has clean white floor tiles and white showcases. By comparison, Wal-Mart outlets – with the exception of the one at Sherway Gardens – don’t always look clean. And you sometimes have to corral a shopping cart in the parking lot on the way in because there’s often none inside.

Target has plenty of carts that are clean, colourful plastic, far better than the wire wrecks at Wal-Mart. And the Target carts are huge, about the size of my first car. Both stores run pretty much even in helpful staff who are readily available for directions when you need them. Checkout was speedy at both places.

What about prices? I bought a variety of items in stationery, household cleaners, bottled water and storage bags. On six of the eight items I bought, the unit price difference between stores was three cents or less. My basket at Target cost $38.62. The same list at Wal-Mart ran $37.95, about 2 percent less, plus I got twenty freezer bags for the price of fifteen at Target.

I liked the Target experience better than Wal-Mart. To be sure, everything is brand-new. But if Canadians thought they were going to see lower prices on everyday items because of the newly arrived competition, it sure didn’t show up in my shopping trip.

A chance for change

When you look at the list of appointees on the advisory council named yesterday to promote the participation of women on public and private corporate boards, you ask: Why only 23 members?

Couldn’t the federal government have found one more person to make it an even two dozen? Ottawa certainly has taken its time to assemble what has turned out to be the world’s largest committee. The names of the appointees are familiar. They’re all fine folks. But maybe we shouldn’t expect too much. The three-point mandate contains such phrases as “provide advice,” “suggest how,” and “make recommendations.” Not exactly an action-packed agenda.

Only 10 percent of directors of Canadian companies are women, an inexplicably low level of involvement that hasn’t changed much in ten years. Nor has there been much improvement for women in executive management. The only place where women hold a majority is on this pink-ribbon committee where they outnumber men 16-7.

Catalyst, an international business women’s advocacy group and one of three, count ‘em three, advisory groups advising the advisors, has called for the proportion of women on boards to be 25 percent by 2017. That strikes me as a reasonable goal. But business pushes back. A Compass poll found that 96 percent of all Chief Executive Officers opposed the idea of what they see as quotas. The Big Five Banks have also resisted a proposal from a Quebec-based shareholders’ rights groups for equal representation by men and women on their boards by 2022.

The answer to this conundrum lies readily at hand. Norway, France, Belgium and other European nations have mandated that female directors must comprise as much as 40 percent of boards. In Britain, companies have been told to voluntarily increase the proportion to 25 percent by 2015 or the government will take mandatory action.

This committee may be too big to devise such excellent answers. It will more likely recommend some lowest-common-denominator notion such as appoint more women or explain why. Such an approach will mean corporate annual reports are filled with wool about the company’s inability to find qualified women and more years will have been lost. By the time the committee reports this fall and the government responds, it will be two years since the idea of a panel was announced in March 2012.

Business in Canada must cease being like those tree houses built by young boys. When girls climbed up they’d find a sign saying, “No wymmen allowed.” Let’s take down the sign. Forever.

The dead and the quiescent

Bad enough that we have to put up with the singing of the Star Spangled Banner before every Major League Baseball game at the Rogers Centre. And why is it that every singer always seems to have so much fun riffing around with the U.S anthem while poor old O Canada always sounds so dreary. More importantly, why do so few members of the crowd sing O Canada. In my part of section 124, I’m pretty much alone in my warbling.

All that is bad enough, as I say, but what the heck was going on last night at the season opener when the announcer asked for a moment’s silence in honour of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last December. To be sure, it was a terrible tragedy. Adam Lanza shot his mother, then went to the school and killed twenty children and six staff before committing suicide. But the last time I looked, the school in question was in Newtown, Connecticut, an eight-hour drive away, across an international border, in another country.

If we took a minute for every person killed by a gun in the U.S. last year, that would be somewhere over 11,000 minutes, or 180 hours, about the duration of 60 baseball games. Is the Americanization of Canada reaching such proportions that we must now memorialize their dead, too? If the powers-that-be were looking for deaths to remember, they could have instead honoured members of the armed forces killed in Afghanistan where 158 Canadians and 2,012 Americans have died for the same cause in the last decade.

But do you know what was the worst part of the minute’s silence at the park last night? The crowd actually fell quiet. Totally quiet. Not even that fool who regularly shouts “Arrrgos” made a peep. What a bunch of sheep we are.

Play it again, Sam

Writers have it rough. We always have to come up with fresh material, day after day, year after year. As soon as I finish writing a book, everyone’s first question is, “What are you going to do next?” Couldn’t we all read this current one first?

Singers have it easy. If any singer has a hit, he or she can perform that song over and over again to the delight of audiences everywhere. In fact, that’s what they want to hear, the old favourites, not some new dud tune. Meatloaf has made a life’s career singing Bat Out of Hell night after night. If that’s too boring, a singer can choose to be Diana Kroll and do covers, singing other peoples’ songs with no protests. People swoon at her Sinatra. Writers can’t do the same. If I began a post by saying, here’s a little something by Dave Barry, I’d at best be laughed at, at worst get whacked with charges of plagiarism.

Broadway has the same capacity to repeat previous success. On stage they’re called “revivals” and you go and see South Pacific all over again, just as your father before you. It’s a different woman washing a different man out of her hair but the same icky sentiment prevails and the same Bali Hai rises in the background. And don’t get me started on symphonies. All those stuffed shirts playing Baroque movements by Bach that have been around since the eighteenth century and maybe played better by their foremothers, too.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Hah! Try that as a writer. I might begin a paean about Toronto with the words, “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town ….” But sooner or later someone would cry out, “He plagiarized Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal where Swift urged the Irish to overcome hunger by eating their young.” And where would that leave me but on the buffet table, too.

Rap artists are particularly egregious about freeloading on others. They even have a name for it, sampling, where they simply run a melody written by someone else right through their work. Usually, such theft forms the best part of an otherwise unlistenable song, but there are no repercussions. In fact, sampling is celebrated. What gives? Why are the rules so different among the various creative forms?

Well, I’m about to change all that. From this day forth, there will be no original work in this blog. Just the republished work of others. Readers who can name the source will get a one-year free subscription. And if you fall for that, you don’t know what day it is.

Justin time

Justin Trudeau’s Empire Club appearance today at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel had both historic resonance and forward thinking. According to organizers, Trudeau was the first speaker ever who had been preceded at the podium by both parents. Trudeau’s father, Pierre, spoke to the club in 1972 and in 1968 he also appeared in the Ontario Room next door to the Canadian Room where Justin was today. That 1968 event, a meeting of the Liberal Party of Ontario, saw the first stirrings of Trudeaumania. A week later he declared his candidacy for leadership.

Justin Trudeau’s reception didn’t have quite the same frisson but he was popular with the audience of 500 or so, many of whom must have been Liberals. For example, at one point he said that candidates for MP should be chosen at the riding level, not by national organizers. The promise brought applause, a sign to me that many attendees had worked for the party in the past and were upset when orders came from on high.

Rather than a speech, the host club put Trudeau in a Q&A format. I was annoyed, I wanted to hear him stand and deliver, but it worked because Trudeau was able to cover eight different topics without having to worry about stitching everything together. He is handsome, articulate, and comfortable in his own skin. While much of what he said was motherhood (politics is too negative, the economy and the environment both matter, young people have to become engaged) I found myself agreeing with everything he said. It’s been a long while since I could say the same about the views of any Canadian politician.

In late 1991, I saw Bill Clinton deliver a foreign policy speech at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He read from notes; it was deadly. Later that same day, I saw him give an election-style stump speech to the National Education Association. He was one of several Democratic presidential candidates seeking the group’s endorsement. Clinton was an entirely different person from the morning. His off-the-cuff speech made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. He went on to win the presidency the next year.

Before I pronounce final judgement on Justin Trudeau, I want to hear him in similar circumstances to see if he can connect with a crowd in the way that a winner must. But my first impression was positive. He is a man of substance.

Grapefruit gripes and grins

I’m just back from watching some Grapefruit League games and I can say that the Blue Jays don’t look as good as they should. I saw three games – against the Orioles in Sarasota, the Rays in Port Charlotte, and the Red Sox in Dunedin. Jays won two of those but after today’s loss to Minnesota, they’re 11-16, second last in the American League, ahead of only the beleaguered Angels.

The good news is that Jose Bautista seems to be over his wrist problems and is hitting home runs. I saw him hit his fifth in spring training over the wall in right centre, his favourite spot. I also saw Colby Rasmus hit a dinger but I think it’s his only one so far and he’s batting somewhere below .200 so he hasn’t solved his issues. In the two games I saw when Adam Lind played he went 0-3 both times and looked way out of kilter. Reyes, Arencibia, DeRosa, Carbrera and Bonifacio are all hitting well. As for poor old Mike McCoy, he just doesn’t get any better, season-after-season.

Last year’s closer, Casey Janssen, pitched one inning against Boston and looked terrific – especially for someone who just had surgery. He used only eleven pitches, struck out two, and got a grounder for the third out. He was throwing 89 mph. The only other pitchers I saw do well were J.A. Happ who might end up in Triple A Buffalo anyway, and Brett Cecil who had three strikeouts in two-and-a-third innings. David Bush is on-again off-again.

What’s impossible to tell is how is the chemistry among so many new players. Even this late in spring training, the Jays are using a lot of players who have no chance of making the team so the likely starting lineup doesn’t get all that much time together. As a result, for example, I got no sense of how the infield will look with Reyes at short and either Bonifacio or Izturis at second.

But never mind, I’m no baseball writer sitting there eating free food and getting facts fed to them as well. I’m just a hopeful fan. For me, it was great to hear the ball on the bat, sit in 5,000-seat stadia where there isn’t a bad seat, and revel in the warmth of the Florida sun.

Red Ed for Governor

Howard Green’s new book on TD Bank, Banking on America, is an excellent read. Rather than take the usual route and focus on the CEO, Ed Clark, Green also gives credit for the successful U.S. strategy to Keith Gray who put together the deal to buy the New York-based discount broker Waterhouse Securities in 1996. That acquistion became a platform for all that followed at TD.

The anchor of BNN’s Headline with Howard Green has been close to Gray for years and the relationship gives the book an insidery feel. Although this is not an authorized book, TD gave Green good access to senior executives. He conducted more than 100 interviews that also included all the living former TD CEOs and many others who know the bank’s growth story.

TD now has more branches in the U.S. (stores they like to call them) than in Canada. TD has grown from the smallest of the Big Five banks to the second largest and much of that success is due to Ed Clark. But earnings in Canada are twice what they are in the U.S. As a result of the imbalance, the jury’s out on his success. You have to admire TD’s aggressive strategy, but what if it all blows up in their face, like Manulife’s acquistion of John Hancock?

The book got me to thinking about what’s next for Clark. He’s already stayed in the CEO role beyond the normal retirement age. Many senior bankers retire at 62 but Clark turned 65 in October 2012. At last report, his contract was extended until at least the annual meeting on April 4 to be held at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa.

Ottawa … hmm. What about Ed Clark as the next governor of the Bank of Canada? Mark Carney moves to the Bank of England in July. The governor’s role would be perfect for Clark who has worked in Ottawa before. As the author of the National Energy Program, he became known as “Red Ed” and won the Outstanding Civil Servant of the Year Award in 1982. Since then he has worked at Merrill Lynch (as did Carney), Canada Trust and TD.

Ed Clark is one among a number of former public servants who joined the private sector. Others include Derek Burney, Mickey Cohen, Michael Sabia, Kevin Lynch, and Paul Tellier. The flow has all been one way. It’s time we gave one back.

Habemus Papam

The last time the world lost a pope and then welcomed his replacement, my late wife and I were living in Florence. We learned the news of both events in April 2005 by the pealing of church bells. The death of John Paul II was announced by the bells at about 10 p.m. on a Saturday night as we walked home from a restaurant. We knew without asking what the sound meant. In recent days, everybody’s favourite pope had been little more than “a soul pulling a body” in the words of a Vatican spokesman.

Two weeks later, I was writing at my desk, when the bells of Giotto’s Campanile began tolling outside the window of our apartment in the historic centre of Florence. They usually rang around 5:30 p.m., but wasn’t it a bit later? I checked, and it was 6:12. I knew the ringing must mean a new pope, and indeed, Benedict XVI had been chosen.

The cardinals have now picked his successor, Francis. This time around, I heard by word of mouth, a less musical means. When John Paul II died, people gathered on the steps of the Duomo and said solemnly to each other, santo subito, a saint soon. Benedict XVI should have sped along the sainthood of his predecessor but he didn’t. Francis must complete the process.

He can’t match the pace set by St. Francis of Assisi, whose name he has taken. That Francis was made a saint within two years of his death, a record set in the thirteenth century that still stands. The Catholic Church was in trouble in those days, too. Much of the lore we know about St. Francis was fabricated by the Vatican to improve its image. The Catholic Church again needs to renew itself through healing and hope. The elevation of John Paul II would be a good place to start.

If we only had a brain

As the grandfather of a tyke hockey player, I worry about injuries, particularly to the head. I have been following with interest the one-man campaign by Roy MacGregor in the Globe and Mail against excessive body-checking and fights that cause concussions. I was disgusted by the Globe editorial on the topic that said we should not rush to abolish body-checking in minor hockey. Expose young players to risk and experience, the editorial argued. What a ridiculous stance. It was as if they hadn’t been reading their own paper.

Author Malcolm Gladwell took a much braver position in a February speech at the University of Pennsylvania. He was talking about violence in football but the same thinking could be applied to hockey. His address, titled How Much Proof Do We Need?, traced the history of society’s response to black lung disease. Sufficient information was known in 1918 about early deaths among coal miners but no action was taken for 50 years. Thousands more men died terrible deaths as a result.

So, too, with football. With the growing number of deaths due to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) suffered by former pro football players – Gladwell reeled off a dozen names in recent years just in northeastern U.S. – there should be no doubt about the connection between regular blows to the helmeted head leading to CTE, brain damage and early death.

Gladwell noted that officials at New York University acted quickly a few years ago to erect safety barriers when two students committed suicide by jumping into a library atrium. No further study was needed. In the case of football, similar suicidal deaths bring neither a speedy response nor any thoughtful study. A major reason is that alumni would complain if football programs were ended and donations might dry up.

As usual, bad decisions are being made on the basis of money. Gladwell recommends ending football in high schools and universities. He urged Penn students to boycott games and set up picket lines outside stadiums. It’s a bold demand that’s unlikely to be followed. But we can’t go on the way we are, allowing young people to ruin the very brains we are trying to educate for their future.

In Canada, let’s at least go back to how professional hockey used to be played – with deft passing and a minimum of contact. Fighting, hard hits and boarding should mean immediate ejection from the game. Repeated offences would be career ending. The new form of play would cascade down through Junior A to house league teams. Our young people deserve no less.

Baywatch

The two catalogues from Hudson’s Bay that arrived with my Saturday paper are the finest I’ve ever seen from any Canadian retailer. The photography is equal to Architectural Digest, the layouts are clean, and the design appealing. The recently renamed Hudson’s Bay with its classy new logo has been improving since 2008 under American ownership and Bonnie Brooks as president and CEO. Her pre-Christmas radio and newspaper ads, focusing on daily specials with up to 70 per cent off, were disruptive and good for consumers. Sales in the last quarter of 2012, the most recent numbers available, were up year-over-year by a healthy 7 percent.

All retailers in Canada are looking to sharpen their offerings with the arrival of Target. Touted as the biggest thing to hit Canada since climate change, Target is set open 125 stores this year. In response, Wal-Mart has reduced prices and Canadian Tire has announced new formats. For my part, I’ve never understood the appeal of Target. I’ve visited Target in the U.S. and remain unimpressed either with store design or the quality of items. What’s the big deal about saving two bucks on Target’s made-in-China tee shirt versus someone else’s made-in-China tee?

To be sure, it’s taken five years for Hudson’s Bay to get where they are, but it’s a long way from the days of George “Pile ‘em high and watch ‘em fly” Kosich who was president of The Bay for ten years. Kosich fared well until Wal-Mart arrived in 1994 and within two years became the biggest retailer in Canada. This time around, with another U.S. competitor coming, The Bay seems better prepared.