Tag: Consumerism

Bottled Water, and the Gentleman™ from Nestle™

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

The Board of Education meeting Tuesday was strange, fascinating, frustrating, and educational. None of those in a good way.

This story gives the headline, but instead of actually discussing the issue, or talking about what happened at the board, it ends up being an advertisement for Nestle water. Rather lazy reporting, I’m afraid.

It is telling that Nestle™ , one of the largest multi-national food conglomerates in the world (2010 revenues: $113 Billion CDN) flew a director in from Toronto to take on two local Grade 11 students. With his 24 years of corporate and marketing communications experience, I’m thinking he doesn’t fly Coach. Near as I can tell, Nestle is in direct competition with PepsiCo, the makers of Aquafina, which is the exclusive brand of water offered at NWSS, so one has to wonder what Nestle’s horse was in this race…

After the Students from the NWSS Environmental Club gave a presentation to Board, reiterating their earlier request that the board take a principled environmental stand here, there were several addresses from the audience on the issue, and some discussion amongst the board members. To protect the innocent, I will not paraphrase any audience members except myself and the Gentleman™ form Nestle™.

Having endured the earlier hour of partisan bickering and procedural minute of the first part of the Board meeting, I decided not to bore the audience with meaningless environmental statistics. The environmental argument against bottle water is pretty cut and dried: bottled water represents a ridiculous victory of clever marketing over common sense, economics, environmental science, and sustainability. Large Multi-Nationals like Nestle take tap water, run it through a filter and maybe add some salt (the benefits of either dubious), stick it in a foul-tasting disposable plastic bottle, chill it (to reduce the plastic flavour), and sell it for 2000x to 3000x the value they pay for the water. The more remarkable part is that we fall for it. But that is where the clever marketing comes in.

We all know who clever marketers like the Gentleman™ from Nestle™ covets the most: teenagers. There is a reason they invest so much time and energy into getting at the captive audiences in high schools. This is where life-long habits are formed the most. Like toothpaste brands, cigarettes and religions: if they get you by 18, they probably have you for life. A high school full of bottled water drinkers will “normalize” paying that 3000x mark-up for a completely unnecessary product. Since all bottled water (labels aside) are exactly the same product, it doesn’t matter if students get hooked on Aquafina, Dasani, or Nestle water: if you get hoodwinked onto buying one, you will be a customer of them all. Enter the Gentleman™ form Nestle™, with no products on NWSS, fighting to keep his competitors products on the shelf there. That’s the FreeMarket® 2.0.

The real story here should be the group of students who identified an environmental, social and moral issue. They educated themselves about the issue, they talked to their peers, they got a petition signed, they presented a report to the Board. This is how Representative Democracy should work. I hope they were not too discouraged by what happened next.

The Gentleman™ from Nestle™ read a prepared statement, using baffling statistics (apparently not as concerned about keeping peoples interest) such as “almost 75% of water bottles in Canada are recycled” (with the other 25% being, presumably, of no concern to anyone, and completely oblivious to the issue of downcycling that the students had already covered in their presentation), made it clear Nestle supported people drinking tap water at home (!?!), made vague suggestions that tap water was less safe, or even an imminent threat to immune deficient people (demonstrably not true) and claimed that all water extraction and bulk sale in Canada is tightly regulated (simply utterly false: there is no regulation on groundwater extraction in British Columbia). But the main point he wanted to make: this was about freedom of choice.

Of course, our students make lots of choices. They may choose to work hard at school and get better grades, they may choose to play video games all night. They may choose to join an environmental club. They choose their friends, and their clothes, and their extra-curricular activities. They may even choose to smoke, or do drugs. Of course, not all choices are equal, and one of the roles if the Education system is help them sift through these choices they are offered. The school system can help make some choices, or they can confuse the issue by allowing the aggressive marketing of the wrong choice to the captive audience of students on school. There is a reason we don’t have cigarette machines in schools, to have them would be to tacitly encourage that choice.

Once the Trustees started the discussion, it was clear the divide was already well drawn. Most seemed to like the recommendation on the table: that bottled water be phased out, along with sugared and caffeinated drinks, and this would not take place until the capitol plans (e.g. three new schools) are completed.

Seeing that this is a rather silly and arbitrary timeline (“we are able to do two things at once”), Trustee Watt attempted to amended the plan to remove the phrase linking the phased plan to the capitol projects. Atkinson, Graham and Cook paradoxically voted against this amendment, without providing good reasons for it, and the two other members abstained (thanks for coming out students, welcome to democracy). Trustee Ewen brought another amendment that water bottle filler fountains be brought to all schools: this received more support, but was accepted only after being watered down (pun?) by Goring asking for “costing” first. In the end, bottled water is leaving the schools, but not for at least another 6 years. Ugh.

The conversation around this was even more telling than the vote or the decision. Trustee Cook mis-quoted a newspaper article and used that as a suggestion that NWSS’s schools water was laced with lead. This sounded especially rich 5 minutes later when Trustee Goring asked (and not rhetorically) where the students ever got the idea that the water wasn’t safe. He suggested that more education about the water was needed (but presumably not from Cook). Of course, Cook thought the water bottle machines were fine, and that instead of getting rid of them, we should educate the students about making the right choice: he even used the successful advertising and social marketing campaigns against smoking as an example. As ridiculous as it sounds, Cook just made a compelling case for bringing cigarette machines back into high schools. The entire conversation was Hellerian .

If the purpose of the Board of Education is to educate, then they have succeeded: I learned a lot going to my first Board meeting. However, I fear I learned more about the Peter Principle than I did about Roberts Rules. As another audience member commented to me after: “If only these meetings were televised, none of these people would ever get re-elected”. On display were not only variations on Roberts Rules, but of basic decorum and respect one would learn in a Grade 2 class. People talked out of order to make cheap shots, people on the left side of the table shared whispered secrets while a person on the other side we talking, and vice versa. I watched one Trustee abstain from a vote on an amendment (causing it to fail), only 5 minutes later to argue a point that the amendment would have supported, leading one to assume he abstained not because he didn’t support the motion, but because of who moved it, or more accurately, which side of the table it came from. There didn’t seem to be any other logical reason for it. One 25-year trustee appeared to be comatose for most of the meeting. Neither people acting as chair (one was challenged successfully at one point) effectively managed the debate, evidenced best by the first half hour where everyone was arguing over some procedural issue relating to the minutes or previous meetings, with there being no motion on the floor to even discuss. After a half hour of unorganized bickering, it ended with no resolution. I felt sorry for the students who were present and had to see that.

Windows, part three.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Our window replacement project now complete, it is all over but the Blogging

Really, our choices were vinyl or wood. Aluminum had no real advantage, fiberglass was out of our price range, as were wood-clad or other complicated hybrid window styles.

So we did what most semi-informed consumers do, we delved into the marketplace.

Full disclosure here, Tig and I are bad consumers. By that, I mean we just don’t do the shopping thing well. To say we have high sales resistance is to downplay the problem. It is more that we rarely find anything worth buying. A trip to the Mall is something we avoid at all costs, as it fills us with what Hunter called “Fear and Loathing”. I simply do not enter the retail environment in the month of December. When one of us decides we need to buy something, say, a shirt for work, we steel our resolve and enter the fray, and rarely come out satisfied with our purchases, and more often walk out having bought nothing, realizing that we are not the target market for anything. The modern consumer experience is not designed for us, and we are not designed for it. So why force the issue?

So when Sssssalesmen start coming to our house with quarter-cuts of windows as samples and lots of glossy brochures, to do a few measurements and drop us an estimate with an abstract 5 digit number on it… this is usually a bad experience for all involved. I am not going to name any of the non-successful bidders, they live in their own window-sales Hell, may the Flying Spaghetti Monster have noodly mercy on their souls. Suffice to say, we saw them all, or a wide enough sampling so as to be statistically significant.

We asked a lot of questions, and some were better at answering them than others. The higher-priced people made compelling cases for rigidity of the vinyl, for higher numbers of void spaces in the window frames, for colour options, for muntin designs to match the heritage of our house.

The problem with vinyl becomes pretty clear: if you want a strong structure with lots of void space for thermal efficiency, there needs to be a big, thick window frame. Making that big, thick window frame fit into the pre-existing hole in the house, without getting into expensive and difficult mucking about with stucco and plaster and drywall, you start to lose significant window space. In a 1940 house with relatively small window space to start with, this becomes significant.

Also, vinyl, for all it’s flexibility in design, is kind of ugly. You can have pretty much any colour you want, but white is about the only colour offered (economies of scale limit the ability of these companies to extrude numerous colours locally). The size of some of our double-hung windows limited the ability of their relatively weak frames to support the structure; so many sssssales people pushed us to alternate styles that were less appealing. The design elements (muntin grilles, opening hardware, etc.) were generally cheap-looking and added on, and took more away from the look than they added.

Then there were uncertainties about the install. We had guys promise to do the total install of 19 windows in one day, “no problems”. That is a pretty bold promise to make in a 70 year old house after 2 minutes of looking at a window. It did not instill confidence that they would be taking utmost care or managing unforeseen issues with my best interests in mind. One test of this was to show the ssssssales person that crappy downstairs install I pointed out earlier. The range of reaction we got were telling. Some were aghast that anyone would slap a window in like that, while others basically said, yeah, it doesn’t look too bad, must have been a funny sized opening… you should maybe add a little silicone… . Needless to say, that quick-filtered many proposals (and, perhaps not paradoxically, those were generally the lowest bidders).

Another irritant was never really having an impression of how the windows in their glossy brochure would look in our house. Invariably, the ssssales guy would show up with a ¼ of a window so we could see the void spaces that made them so efficient, but rarely with a complete window. Some offered local references, and this lead to us wandering the streets of Queens Park and West end looking at (not through) innocent people’s windows. We also tried to go to any showrooms or warehouses so we could put our fingers on the actual product, see what it actually looks like. This caused some of the ssssales people discomfort, and some companies really didn’t have a showroom or display product (other than the ¼-cut window with all those wonderful void spaces!) to show. Is it just me, or is asking someone to spend 5 figures on a product they really haven’t seen a normal thing in sales?

After a couple of months, and more than a dozen sales folks, it seemed we were back to Square 1. Exploring the options for wood windows lead us to a couple of fairly large and well-regarded companies, and initial meetings looked good. We got to go to an actual showroom to look at actual windows, install options looked good. Unfortunately, being a relatively small project to some of these companies, it seemed options were limited. Not totally limited, but very cost limited. As these windows were manufactured in far-off places familiar only from Coen Brothers Movies, every little deviation from a “standard” size of install added up quickly. Wood manufacturing does not have the flexibility at the factory level that vinyl does.

Then we found a local company that seemed to get it. They made wood windows specifically for the heritage-home market, and their ssssales guy was also the owner, so he was interested in making us happy instead of his commission. He was also very straight-forward about what was and wasn’t possible in our house, he was realistic about what we could (and should) do. He was incredibly patient taking the time to answer our questions, but didn’t call us every day to try to close the sale. He was also asking a little more than we wanted to spend. But pretty soon in, Tig and I know we found our guy, we just needed to figure out how to get the windows.

The end of civilization will be Grāpe® flavoured.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

The Clean Bin movie was great. Well attended, and a well-shot and entertaining movie with surprisingly high production value and humour. The filmmakers were friendly and engaging, and had a nice Q&A session after. It was a good evening.

A few people wondered how the film topic (reducing trash) meshed with the food security ideals of a local Farmers Market. In the film the link became obvious. Through trying to reduce excess and non-recyclable packaging, the filmmakers ended up buying more food at the local Farmers Market, while being exacerbated by trying to purchase food at the local SupraMarket without packaging. They also found themselves eating better and saving money, as whole foods replaced processed food in their diet.

Which brought me to think about a book I read a few years ago, ”The End of Food” by Thomas Pawlick. The book begins with his description of the modern tomato, closer to a tennis ball than it is to the tomato that previous generations loved. Due to selective breeding for characteristics like shelf life, durability for shipping, predictable ripening time, and size, the consumer tomato has undergone evolutionary change. Unfortunately, flavour and nutrition are not two things that are selectively bred towards. Therefore, tomatoes are puffed-up, bland, tough, nasty brutes compared to the Tomatoes of our parent’s youth. Worse, according to the USDA’s own reports, the modern tomato contains significantly less vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, potassium and protein than they did 50 years ago. They do, however have 65% more fat, and more than twice as much sodium as they did in the 1960s.

There is no doubt that factory food production and delivery has made more kinds of food available to more people. Unfortunately, the actual food is commonly less healthful than it once was.

That said, I am not a big believer in the “organic food” movement. The term “organic” is so fuzzy as to be meaningless, and too often people shut off their critical thinking and assume “organic” means it is good for you or more ethical, in the same way we have (still do?) with “whole grain” or “Fat Free”. If there is any diet idea I can agree with, it is Michael Pollen’s “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. As such, I spend most of my time in the grocery store around the outside walls, where the veggies, meat, and other food is, and away from those inner aisles where the food-inventions in boxes-in-foil and foil-in-boxes are shelved. As long as we have produce, we won’t starve.

Until I saw the Grapple® at my local Cave-in Foods. There, in the fruit section, between BC and Washington state apples of various variety, is a plastic-packaged 4-pack of apples. Intrigued by the wasteful packaging choice, I was horrified to read what the product really was.

An artificially flavoured apple…

Apples are, hands down, my favourite food. I eat one every day if I have access. Hate apple juice, like apple pie, can give or take dried apples, but absolutely love a fresh, crisp apple. Granny Smith (when crisp), Macintosh (when you can get them from the fruitstand in Keremeos) or Fuji are my favourites. It never occurred to me that impregnating an apple with artificial grape flavour would be an improvement.

Don’t get me wrong: I like grapes. Grapes are great in all their forms, except the form of an apple, a banana, a grapefruit.. any other form of fruit.

Artificial Grape Flavour is great for getting children to take cough medicine, but an asinine way to get a kid to eat an apple. It is like mixing single malt scotch with Grape Tang, I don’t care if you like it better that way, it is wrong to the core.

What does this say about our society? That we add artificial flavour to fruit in the produce section? Or that people are actually shelling out $5 for a plastic-clamshell 4-pack of apples with artificial flavour when they can get 6 apples and a pound of grapes for $5?

I wept for mankind.

On Farmers Markets and Clean Bins

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The Royal City Farmers Market is one of the Jewels in the crown of the revitalized Royal City, and it is just the kind of grass-roots community building organization that the NWEP exists to support. The RCFM has grown and prospered to such a scale that it hardly resembles the nascent organization that appeared only a couple of years ago. Current RCFM President Andrew Murray and a core team of volunteers and staff have made the Market a weekly ritual for Queens Park, Downtown and Brow residents, while attracting customers and hangers-on from Sapperton the West End, and other parts of the City.

The introduction of monthly indoor Winter Markets last year was rewarded with great crowds, as the combination of preserves, prepared foods, crafts made up for the lack of variety of farm-fresh local veggies and fruit we are used to in the summer.

Last year’s Fundraiser at the Heritage Grill was most memorable for the apologies the staff and volunteers were handing out for the overwhelming response. The place was so crowded, that it took longer than usual to get drinks or the meals prepared. But no-one was complaining as the music and the company were great, as was the charity auction.

This year, the RCFM folks have decided to spice up their Societies-Act -mandated Annual General Meeting with a screening of the film “The Clean Bin Project”. I haven’t seen the film, but am aware of the filmmakers and their project to go without producing waste for one year, as the Glenbrook North Zero Waste Challenge folks were all over the story.

Apparently the movie is inspirational and refreshing in that the do-gooders in the central role don’t take themselves to seriously, or even try to suggest this is a viable option for most people. It is just intended to be an eye-opener to a subject that we all take for granted:

The Clean Bin Project – Trailer from Grant Baldwin Videography on Vimeo.

So, go to the RCFM AGM, and see what a dedicated group of community activists can create.

See the Clean Bin Movie screening, and see what a couple of dedicated local activists can achieve.

Support the next RCFM Winter Market, on February 12th.

Windows, part 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 7 Comments.

Once we had settled on replacing windows, the journey really began. The house is ca.1940, and all of the main floor windows are wood frame, single-hung, single-pane. All of the counterweight strings are broken, so we had been using strategically shaped blocks of wood to prop them open. Before we arrived on the scene, renovations were done in the house in two stages, with wood-frame single-hung double pane wood windows being used in the converted attic, and double-pane sliding vinyl windows being used in the basement.

Front Picture window, with original leading.

?????

Original single-hung single-pane wood windows.

??

??????????????

??
The ones downstairs should have given us some cautionary idea of what we are getting into. At least one of them was an “off the shelf” vinyl window from a hardware store, and did not fit the hole in the side of the house ideally. It has been installed with the flashing on the outside of the house with the caulking puffing out between the flashing and the nailed-together wood spacers. It might have looked real sharp when it was done, but it looked pretty terrible a decade later. The other windows were not much better: one installed with the drain holes facing in (and blocked), none of the slid very well in their casings, or opened very wide, and the proportion of window-to sash was depressingly smaller, making basement suite darker than it needed to be.
Terrible, terrible basement vinyl window install.

??

The attic windows were probably OK, we might have gotten along with a bit of maintenance, but at this point we were 17 windows in, another two more wouldn’t increase the marginal cost that much, and for the sake of consistency, we decided to replace them all.?????

Double-pane wood replacements, used in 1980’s (?) attic renovation

?

“We decided” will be used throughout this monologue, but that really belies the amount of discussion, argument, hair-pulling, and cajoling it takes for us to make these decisions. The Better Half had her priority list, essentially around making sure that the windows added to the value of the house, by complimenting the 1940 wood flooring and the unique Amish-Bauhaus-English-antiques furnishings style she somehow pulls off quite successfully. I was mostly concerned that the windows be the most efficient we can afford. She worried about frame proportions, leading, opening styles, and colours; I worried about what Low-E glass types are most appropriate for our climate and whether Argon was really superior to regular air. We did agree that installation was as important as windows, and that we were going to buy from someone who we trusted to do the installation jog right.

The first question that needs to be answered is what type of frame material to use. The basic options are aluminum, vinyl, wood, fibreglass, or some sort of hybrid. The list of advantages and disadvantages is huge.

Aluminum was off the table pretty early. They have certain structural and maintenance advantages and provide the biggest window-to-sash ratio, which is why they are so popular with high-rises, rental and commercial properties. However, they are remarkably inefficient. Aluminum frames work like the aluminum fins on your old Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine: they are excellent heat exchangers, sucking heat out of your house and warming the air outside. They are moderate in cost (falling between the cheapest vinyl windows and the most expensive wood frames), but did not match the style of the house, and were inefficient: so the decision was easy.

Aluminum windows, lots of glass, but no efficiency.

Vinyl is probably the most popular material for replacement windows, and the Yellow Pages (remember them?) are full of companies that will plop a vinyl insert into your existing window frames, with creative names from AAA Windows to ZYZ Windows. Vinyl has several advantages: it can be made thermally quite efficient by building frames with lots of void spaces, they can be made in various colours and can be painted, and they can be very inexpensive. Some of the problems are the generally low window-to-sash ratio, which seems to get worse with increased efficiency (as those insulating void spaces have to come from somewhere), and a general “plastic” look, which only gets worse with attempts to hide it (ornate finishes, printed or wood veneers, etc.). There is also a large apparent variation in quality of construction, and the amount of concern the companies put into the install in the house.

Vinyl windows, efficiency comes at the expense of window area.

Wood windows have significant advantages. They generally look good, and since that is what the house already has, they are the quickest match to the style of the house. They are also the most thermally-efficient frame material. They fit somewhere between Aluminum and Vinyl in the window-to-sash ratio. The disadvantages are cost (more than Aluminum or the most expensive Vinyl), and maintenance issues. Wood is wood, and needs to be protected from the elements, and that means some level of ongoing maintenance would be required. Some of this can be offset but using a clad-wood window, where the wood frame has a thin aluminum cladding on the outside. This is by far the most expensive option.

Aluminum-clad wood windows, the best of
both worlds, the highest of all costs.

Fiberglass windows can be made almost as thermally efficient as wood, and very strong in a structural sense. They can be powder-coated which makes them durable and low maintenance. Unfortunately, fibreglass options are limited (they seem to be more popular in places with continental climates the suffer temperature extremes), and are expensive. They also come in limited styles and sizes, as the manufacturing process is not as flexible as vinyl or wood. Aesthetically, they resemble Vinyl more than they probably should.

The efficiency issues were a little easier. The advantages of triple glazing (increased thermal efficiency and noise abatement) did not make sense in our coastal climate, or in our relatively quiet Brow-of-the-Hill neighbourhood. Low-E glass (where a coating is applied to one of the frames which limits the transmission of infrared (keeping heat in during the winter and out during the summer) is great, but needs to be balanced around reflectivity and brightness issues. Everything I read says Argon helps, even if I remain somewhat sceptical about the science of those claims (with my basic chemistry-physics education, which is usually deeply flawed) .

Then there is Energy-Star rating. Energy-Star windows are certified to meet some level of efficiency. Since we had an “energy audit” in the dying days of the LiveSmart BC program, we would receive $70 per window if we bought Energy Star rated windows, a not-unsubstantial $1,300 total for our house.

Replacement window insert, in this case
Vinyl going into an existing wood frame.

The decisions were difficult. No matter which way we go, this was going to be the most expensive purchase we have made in our lives (outside of the mortgage!), easily as much as a new car (it is worth noting we drive a Honda Civic we bought used for less than I paid for my last bicycle.) And the “getting informed” part of the process exposed us to too much contradictory data, too many contradictory claims, too much advice from people who would have us spend a fortune for each incremental increase in efficiency, and from people who advise us to buy the cheapest we can because “they are all the same…how long are you going to own that house anyway?” (we can debate at length the sustainability ideas of that train of thought). And we experienced lots of sssssales men (and women), with different styles, different approaches, although the results always seemed the same, that was to make us less certain of the purchase, not more certain.

For people like us who find no joy in shopping at the best of times, it was not fun.