When Sarah first started working at an Ontario Target store almost two years ago, she was brimming with excitement. "We thought, this is it, we’re the bee's knees, we’re setting up a store that’s going to take over."
Sarah is not her real name. She wants that withheld, she says, because "we’ve been told as a team that we’re not to speak to the press or we could be terminated early." Target spokesman Eric Hausman said in an emailed statement that it’s standard practice that media only deal with the company’s public relations department.
Sarah believes her bright beginning at Target has deteriorated into the darkest of endings. The team floor member first learned Target Canada was doomed, not from her employer, but from the television news in the staff lunch room.
"Within half an hour of it being on the news, we had [customers] coming in going, 'When’s it all going liquidation, when’s the sales start?’ Like, whoa, we just found out half an hour ago we’re losing our jobs. Let us wrap our head around that."
Sarah says it wasn’t until at least an hour after learning the news that management started informing employees that Target was closing its 133 Canadian stores and letting go its approximately 17,600 workers.
Research by CIBC predicts two retailers will bid for the available retail space: Walmart Canada and Loblaw Companies, the parent of Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart, among others. "Walmart would kill to get these sites; Loblaw would kill to keep Walmart from getting these sites," the report, published last week, says. Canadian Tire and Lowe's are also likely to be in the running for some Canadian locations, which have a combined value of $1.1 billion.
CIBC predicts "an aggressive bidding war" between Walmart and Loblaw (they like to use the word "war") that could see Target's real estate fetch $2 billion.
Some of the Toronto sites, however, have restrictions that prevent Loblaw from simply dropping in a supermarket. "Adding these sites could force Loblaw into the general merchandise business in a bigger way than they might like," possibly opening the door to the introduction of a new Loblaw-owned store concept, CIBC says.
Walmart Canada, on the other hand, would find it relatively easy to simply repurpose former Target locations for its own use. Target deliberately selected Zellers stores away from Walmart locations, and so, if Walmart takes over, there will be few geographical clashes.
In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa heads to town promising to return by nightfall, but a terrible storm blows through, and he finds himself trapped in a snow bank for three days. To survive, he eats the candy he brought for the girls’ Christmas stockings.
It’s a tale of pluck and miscalculation not lost on the publishers of Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s new annotated autobiography. Last November, they found themselves trapped in a snowbank of preorders for the book, which they won’t dig their way out of until March. They didn’t have to eat the Christmas peppermints, but they did leave Wilder fans crying in their homespun handkerchiefs when the book didn’t arrive in time for the holidays.
“Everyone keeps saying, ‘Where’s my copy, where’s my copy?’ ” says Sandra Hume, writer for the Beyond Little House blog and co-founder of the biennial “LauraPalooza,” a festival of all things Ingalls (which in previous years featured comedy of the Nellie Oleson actress from the TV series and a presentation by a meteorologist on the historical validity of Wilder’s The Long Winter).
Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, the book’s publisher, said that Pioneer’s initial print run was 15,000. The books arrived at their warehouse the first week in November. By Thanksgiving, the press had not only exhausted that supply, but would take some 15,000 more orders. Coverage in a raft of publications, from The L.A. Times to the National Enquirer, sent demand through the sodhouse roof.* And that didn’t even count Amazon’s orders, which were around 30,000 and didn’t arrive until December. Those are the ones that won’t be filled until the third print run in March-ish.
Governments from Poland to Croatia are under pressure to mimic Hungary’s help for eastern European borrowers with $40 billion in Swiss-franc loans, without repeating the same mistakes.
Romania is considering a proposal to convert franc loans at a discounted rate while Croatia moved to force banks to take exchange-rate losses for the next year. Poland, for now, isn’t considering emulating Hungary’s full-conversion of franc mortgages. Leaders in all three nations face elections in the next two years.
As countries in the European Union’s east weigh steps to help about 800,000 borrowers, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s five-year fight to root out foreign-currency loans is serving as both a model and a cautionary tale for policy makers. Orban’s measures weakened the forint and curtailed lending before he moved to convert all foreign-currency mortgages in November, ahead of the franc’s surge last week.
“The Hungarian lesson should raise some red flags,” Viktor Szabo, who helps oversee $12 billion in emerging-market debt at Aberdeen Asset Management Plc, said by phone from London on Tuesday. “While there may be valuable lessons in there, a bank-sector shock similar to Hungary’s may jeopardize growth in the region.”
New Year's Eve is a special time for many, and for Craig Friesen and Matt Wiens, it was especially meaningful.
The Saskatoon couple was married on Dec. 31 in Osler, Sask., in the presence of family, friends and the church community.
The men's wedding marks a point in history for the Mennonite denomination in Canada. Friesen and Wiens are the first same-sex couple publicly married in a Canadian Mennonite church.
"Our relationship doesn't feel different, but our relationship with our community and with our faith has changed at least a little bit. It was really beautiful and freeing," Friesen said.
[. . .]
Mennonite Church Canada as a denomination isn't publicly welcoming of LGBT people or affirming of same-sex marriage. The denomination's confession of faith states that marriage is between a man and a woman for life.
Last year, however, the governing body in Saskatchewan announced that congregations could decide on their own whether or not they would be welcoming and the church would not take action against it. This was decided, in part, to keep some congregations from leaving the denomination.
As little as 18 months ago, one could still count hundreds of people in the Moscow metro who were prepared to demonstrate their involvement in political protest. No one wears the famous white ribbons anymore. The imitation of political activity on social networks has triumphed over real political activity, once and for all. Russians still turn out to defend their economic rights, but no one protests against the illegitimacy of parliament. Does anyone actually still remember that the Russian Duma is illegitimate? The war in Ukraine and the economic crisis, it seems, have completely eclipsed the political protest we saw in 2011-2012.
So, who are those people who took to the streets, and have now just as unexpectedly disappeared?
Apparently, the former protesters aren’t sure themselves. The social composition of the failed 'snow revolution' has been variously described, but the terminological confusion that this created only goes to demonstrate the acute identity crisis of the protesters. Identification and self-identification were focused around two seemingly interchangeable terms: 'middle class' and 'creative class'. Members of the opposition themselves declared that the 2011-2012 protests were a movement of the creative class. Those who did not support the white ribbon wearers still talk of the opposition-minded in derogatory terms (kreakly – creatives) in the pro-Putin media and social networks.
Just like the 19th century Russian intelligentsia’s love for Marxism, in the 2000s, Russians became obsessed with the theory of the creative class.
The Russian translation of Richard Florida's 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life appeared in 2005. This concept soon became a source of inspiration for people who believed Russia possessed 'a capacity for innovation' and 'a knowledge-based economy', as well as those who believed that progress would be possible without actually changing the political system. The phrase itself quickly became fashionable: ‘creative class’ became part of everyone’s vocabulary (whether you believed in it or not). Yet discussions on topics such as 'Is there a creative class in Russia?' demonstrated first and foremost that the participants had not read Florida.
There was, of course, no creative class in Russia, or certainly not the phenomenon that Florida was writing about. For Florida, a creative class could only emerge if certain conditions – the ‘Three T’s’ – were met: talent (a talented, well-educated, and qualified population), technology (technological infrastructure is essential for the support of business), and tolerance (a diverse community guided by the principle of 'live and let live').
Where I live at Dufferin and Davenport, the modest dwellings of Corso Italia meet the larger houses of Regal Heights.
More young people are moving into this neighbourhood north of the Dupont tracks in search of reasonable rent while staying close to the cultural institutions of the west end. Unsurprisingly, some see the influx of new residents as gentrification. But the numbers don’t quite add up in that regard.
According to the 2006 census, the most recent city data, these neighbourhoods had average individual incomes of $29,000 and $31,362, respectively. Compared to the 2006 citywide average income of $29,068, areas like Dufferin and Davenport are decidedly average: not too wealthy, but by no means poverty-stricken.
Young people aren’t moving to this area seeking dirt cheap cost of living. Rather, they’re looking for something more affordable than the prohibitively expensive rents colonizing the more southerly parts of the west end.
Maybe it’s the cafes, venues and art spaces that have begun to emerge, especially along Geary Avenue. As the US-based gentrification watcher Curbed points out, brunch spots, craft beer bars, and “inexplicable” general stores all score high points when determining if a neighbourhood is gentrified.
However, the kind of culture that young people are establishing in this area, the kind of culture pointed at by Curbed and described as “new” and “radical,” looks remarkably like the lifestyles that have already been forged by the Italian and Portuguese populations over the last 50 years: lively street culture, gardening, people watching from porches, DIY wine and beer making, hanging out in cafes. These are all activities that could be equally called “hipster” and “Italian.”
Toronto has a deeper connection to London, England than it does to almost any other city in the world. After all, our entire country was essentially ruled from this place for more than a hundred years. Some of the most important moments in the history of our city happened in this city, nearly six thousand kilometers away. As you walk through the streets of Westminster, or Piccadilly, or Mayfair, you’re likely to pass dozens of hidden connections to the history of Toronto without ever realizing they’re there.
Lots of that history is found in the centre of the city — in the bits you can see in this photo. So I thought I’d explore some of the Toronto stories hidden in the streets of Central London: from the solider who founded our city, to the mayor who rebelled against it, to the moment when Canadian women were finally seen as people. Each number on the map comes with its own story, plus links to full posts about most of them, some other spots in Central London connected to those stories, and a link to find the exact locations on Google Maps.
Hipsters, one assumes, are the Trustafarians de nos jours.How can young people afford to live in London at all, to pay rent or have a mortgage, let alone Shoreditch? It’s a mystery. Why aren’t they so worried about billsand the future that membership of somehappening tribe is neither here or there? Family money. Has to be. Spoilt brats, wanting it all – to be rich and alternative, with their humanities degrees and their entrepreneurial cereal cafes, their ability to paddle along on their raft of aspiration, seemingly unaware of the hardships of those they displace?
But even the hipsters can only manage the capital for a while. The young middle classes are moving out of London like they haven’t done since the 1960s and 70s, when “white flight” was seen as a problem. Cities like Birmingham are already noting the arrival of people with more money than sense, who will attract other people with more money than sense, until the people with more sense than money start finding that this isn’t Kansas any more.
Kansas may be choc-a-block with hipsters too, for all I know. But the most hipster place I’ve even been to is Magazine Street in New Orleans, a long shopping street lined with perfect pastel-painted clapboard, little boutiques and brocante. Post-Katrina, the white middle classes are moving to New Orleans in large numbers, lured by lovely old houses at prices that are cheap to them and ludicrously expensive to the local population. Pick up any edition of the local paper and you’ll find some former New Yorker who moved to New Orleans prior to this influx, making some tortured argument about the great integrity of his own move to the city. I’ve heard it all before.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootdancing_serpent