Had fabulous take-out from a local Thai restaurant last night which satisfied my spice craving. Tonight friends are coming over for dinner, so I should eat well this weekend!
Might check out 'The British Isles Show' tomorrow (note, possibly the worst web site in the history of the world), which is on in Toronto this weekend. (bloody hell, that website is so bad it doesn't even tell you when it is!).
Which leads me to a small rant about the web in Canada in general - piss poor. E-Commerce is practically non-existent. It's difficult / impossible to order much online without ending up ordering it from the US and having to pay massive import duty. You're basically limited to doing your banking, buying books (which are disproportionately expensive in Canada) or you can get a couple of select items from one of the two (yes two) department stores that exist in this country. Wake up to the new millennium Canada please! It has to be some kind of desperate attempt to hang on to (or perhaps create) their own identity that they make it extremely difficult for the consumer here by being so anal about the amount of imported goods that can be sold here, or brought in from the outside. All very well but what is here is shite.
Protectionism has a long (many centuries) history in most parts of the world. Not so much in Europe these days since a lot of Europe is now under one umbrella but I suspect if you look back before the EU/EC/EEC you'd find much the same thing.
No idea what online ordering is like in the U.K. but it's probably more like it is in the States. Compared to that, it definitely sucks here. Keep in mind that our market is about 1/10 the size of the U.S. market so if there are (say) 20 major online stores in the U.S. selling some sort of widget, there'd only be about 2 here, which leads to less selection, less competition, and therefore higher prices. I've noticed this with camera gear, for example; for high-end stuff, it's actually cheaper to order it from the States and pay for the border hassles rather than buying locally, because the largest few American online/mail-order camera stores probably sell more stuff each than all of the Canadian camera stores sell in total.
Ditto on the bricks-and-mortar stores. If a couple of major department store chains in the States each buy out a handful of competitors, there are still several left. If the same thing happens here, there's nothing left but the couple of chains that are buying.
Our government has laws which are supposed to ensure competition - just as the States and Europe do - but they're barely enforced. You'd pretty much have to take out full-page ads in every newspaper in the country, saying you plan to rape and pillage the consumer, before the government would even think of forbidding you to take over your only competitor.
Posted by: Steve at March 8, 2004 07:04 PM