It was always there for you. Then something changed.
And boy, are you peeved.
Companies spend a lot of marketing dollars promoting their brand to make you love their product. But all relationships can go sour. And brands have good reason to be fearful of once loyal customers who turn against them and set out to damage the reputation of the company, says a study by the University of Western Ontario
Rustic, off the grid summer cottages don’t have the romantic appeal they used to, as buyers increasingly demand more features, cottage experts say.
“For many of us a cottage was a place our grandparents owned in a structure primarily made of wood that the family opened on May 24 weekend and closed Thanksgiving,” said Cameron Mitchell, a Collingwood-based mortgage specialist at a panel hosted by the Bank of Montreal on Thursday. “Families are today buying recreational properties that are for the most part utilized for all four seasons.”
Buyers today want all the bells and whistles, not just indoor plumbing and four season use, but also cable and Internet. Some of the ultra luxury properties also feature infinity pools, hot tubs, wine cellars, and theatre rooms – uncommon features a decade ago.
“I wouldn’t want to be without hot water today, but for years I did. Times change and needs have changed over the years,” said Rick Crouch, former president of the Georgian Triangle Real Estate Board. “There are a small percentage of people willing to rough it, but they are getting fewer in number.”
Although median prices have risen about 4 per cent from a year ago, values are still off the 2007 peak in Ontario cottage country.
Analysts say prices are still down by as much as 20 per cent in some areas. The Ontario market has 13 separate regions with waterfront property ranging from $180,000 to the multi-millions.
The lower end of the market and mid-range properties have remained balanced, with sales and pricing about the same as last year.
Where sales seem to have increased is at the top end of the market. Sales over the $1 million mark have jumped by about 11 per cent this year over last according to ReMax Ontario Atlantic Canada.
“It wasn’t too many years ago that if you saw a million-dollar sale go through our board you took notice. But that’s not the case anymore,” said Crouch.
This January, Crouch sold a property for about $2.75 million, at the time the highest price paid for a residence in the Georgian Triangle area, which includes Blue Mountain and Collingwood. Less than two weeks later another property sold for $3.25 million.
“My 15 minutes of fame lasted about 12 minutes,” quipped Crouch.
Analysts say a recovering economy and a buoyant Bay Street financial sector in Toronto has helped to boost luxury sales in cottage country.
“Well-heeled buyers had a good year with good bonuses last year and it looks like they’re rewarding themselves,” said Crouch. “Where sales seem to be sluggish is in the under $350,000 range, where people may be most impacted by job loss or the economy.
Also read:
This $4.9M cottage has 11 bedrooms
8 places to look for a cottage in Ontario
Don’t want to own? Go fractional
5 things to ask when buying a cottage
Swedish fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB on Wednesday blamed higher procurement costs as well as campaigns and special offers for an 18 percent drop in second-quarter profits.
The Stockholm-headquartered retailer said Wednesday that net profit in the three-month period fell to 4.3 billion kronor ($673 million) from 5.2 billion kronor in the same quarter a year ago.
Sales in the quarter rose to 32.4 billion kronor from 31.6 billion kronor however, while gross margin shrank to 61.7 percent from a previous 65.9 percent.
“Increasing interest rates, higher energy prices and austerity measures in many economies have decreased consumer spending power,” the company said. “This has led to many price campaigns and special offers in the fashion retail industry during the spring.”
Purchasing costs were also higher than usual in the quarter, it said. This was mainly attributed to currency effects related to the strong krona and the weak U.S. dollar, cost inflation in the sourcing markets as well as lower spare capacity with suppliers no credit check payday loans.
“H&M chose not to pass on the increased purchasing costs to the customers,” it said, adding it had instead profited from increased market share as it strengthened its pricing position.
A one-off cost of 248 million kronor for its staff incentive program also affected bottom-line figures.
CEO Karl-Johan Persson said that despite the challenges faced in the sales and sourcing markets, his company sees “great potential for future growth in existing as well as in new markets.”
The company is planning 178 new stores in the second half of this year, with China, Britain and the U.S set to be the main expansion locations. Nineteen shops will be closed in the same period.
“Our business concept works well in all our markets as seen for example in recently added and fast growing markets such as China where we expand more rapidly,” Persson said.
Johnson & Johnson will cut back on manufacturing and development of heart stents, and will take a charge of $500 million to $600 million as it restructures its Cordis heart device business.
The New Brunswick, N.J., company says Cordis will stop making Cypher and Cypher Select drug-coated stents by year-end, and it will also stop development of a new drug-coated stent called Nevo. Cordis will focus on other areas of the heart device market where there is greater demand cheap business cards.
The company will eliminate up to 1,000 jobs as it shuts two manufacturing plants and consolidates a research and development team.
Stents are mesh-wire tubes that are used to hold arteries open after they are surgically cleared of fatty plaque. Sales have been hurt in recent years by safety concerns.
Stocks appeared set to open higher Tuesday following four straight days of losses. Traders are awaiting remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that could indicate whether the Fed will continue its loose-money policies.
In an afternoon speech, Bernanke is expected to discuss the direction its monetary policy will take after the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying program winds down. The stimulus is due to expire this month, and the Fed has been expected to begin tightening its monetary policy by the end of this year to head off inflation.
But investors have received a barrage of disappointing economic data over the past several weeks, capped Friday by a government report showing employers added far fewer jobs than expected in May. The raft of indicators has suggested that the U.S. economic recovery might be strumbling, and raised the possibility that the Fed will keep interest rates near zero well into next year or even extend its bond-buying program.
Before the opening bell, Dow Jones industrial average futures rose 34 points, or 0.3 percent, to 12,121. Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures rose 5, or 0 payday loan.4 percent, to 1,290. Nasdaq futures rose 5, or 0.2 percent, to 2,279.
Stocks plunged over the last four days as the U.S. economic recovery looked weak and Europe’s debt crisis worsened. The Dow fell 480 points over four days, its biggest four-day loss in over a year, and its longest losing streak since last August. Monday, the S&P 500 closed below 1,300 for the first time since March 23.
Oil prices fell toward $98 a barrel ahead of an OPEC meeting that could result in higher oil production. Rising oil prices have contributed to the recent stock sell-off. Oil has hovered around $100 since March. Later this week, ministers from the 12 countries that comprise the oil cartel OPEC will consider or not to raise oil output levels. Producing more oil would ease the pressure on prices.
On Monday, the Dow fell 61.30 points, or 0.5 percent, to 12,089.96. The S&P 500 dropped 13.99 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1,286.17.The Nasdaq fell 30.22, or 1.1 percent, to 2,702.56.
Don’t blame speculators for your pain at the pump, says Bill O’Grady. First blame the worldwide thirst for oil. Then blame the Federal Reserve for a cheap-money policy that makes commodities look attractive to investors.
Then blame fear, building quietly around the world, that America may someday stop being the global policeman.
O’Grady spent most of his career as a commodities guy. He followed the price of oil, gold, corn and the like at A.G. Edwards & Son.
He wrote a daily commentary on the energy markets that delved into the politics of the Middle East and drew the admiration of military officers as well as energy traders.
It was an odd place to end up for a fellow who once planned to seek God instead of mammon.
“I’d always considered being a Catholic priest,” O’Grady said. So, out of college, he signed up with the Jesuits, perhaps the most academic and intellectual branch of the priesthood.
The Jesuits have a long apprenticeship program for potential priests, and they sent him to study at for a master’s degree in economics at St. Louis University. Ironically, that helped undo his vocation.
“My first three years in the Jesuits were great. My last two, I was becoming increasingly unhappy,” he said. “I just decided I’d rather be a husband and a father than a Jesuit.”
He also found that Jesuits have a hard time with raw capitalism. “As I studied economics, and I got increasingly comfortable with the freedom that markets provide, I was increasingly at odds with the more leftist view of the world that was common among Catholic religious,” he said.
“They are very uncomfortable with markets. The basis of market economics is self-interest. For Catholics, to build your whole economic system around a human flaw is not what God put us here for,” he added.
O’Grady left before being ordained, and became as a foreign currency analyst at a small brokerage in Clayton, then moved to Mercantile Bank as an international economist, analyzing nations where the bank was lending money.
By the late 1980s, Mercantile and many other banks were losing their shirts on third-world loans, and trying to get rid of them. “We were selling Nicaragua (loans) for a nickel,” he said.
Mercantile wouldn’t need an international economist much longer, so in 1989 he signed up as a commodities analyst at A.G. Edwards, and started studying the energy markets.
That was just before the first Persian Gulf War sent oil prices through the roof. It taught him a lesson: “You can do all the supply and demand analysis you want on the oil market, but if you don’t understand the geopolitics, you’re in trouble,” he said.
So, he studied Arab, Persian and Russian history, and began writing his commentary.
O’Grady spent a couple of years studying the stock markets. After Wachovia Bank bought A.G. Edwards in 2007, he became its chief investment strategist.
He and Mark Keller, Edwards’ head of asset management, left in 2008 to form their own firm, Confluence Investment Management in Webster Groves.
There are three sorts of players in the oil market; oil producers, companies that need the oil, and investors who buy oil contracts hoping to make money on price changes. Our readers are paying almost four bucks a gallon for gas. Is that because of supply and demand, or all those evil speculators driving up the price?
In demand, there are two components. There is consumption, then everything else. Demand also includes expectations of future prices and future supplies.
What we are deeming now as speculation, is really a component of demand that is trying to address expectations of future costs.
Then we’re not at the mercy of folks that don’t really need the oil, but are just playing the game?
We want to blame those guys, saying if they weren’t here the price would be lower. That’s probably not the case.
The Fed has basically been running Fed Funds (a benchmark lending rate) below the rate of inflation since 2000. We’ve had 11 years of pretty easy monetary policy.
So people are saying, “OK, for the next five years I can either own a five-year Treasury earning 1.8 percent, or I can own oil. Oil looks like a better bet.”
In the past decade, when people weren’t comfortable with financial assets, they bought real estate. That didn’t work out so well.
Are we inflating a commodities bubble?
(O’Grady doesn’t think so.) We’re also seeing an historic shift in global growth patterns (with developing nations producing more of the world’s goods). Those countries tend to be much more resource intensive than the developed countries. China takes about three times more energy than we do to create a unit of GDP. If China’s GDP is going to grow to be as large as ours, then that is going to dramatically stretch oil, coal, uranium, natural gas
Fortune Brands says it has reached a deal to sell its Acushnet Co. golf business to a group of Korean investors including athletic company Fila Korea Ltd. for $1.2 billion.
The business includes the Titleist and FootJoy brands.
The deal is a major step in Fortune’s plan to break itself up. It plans to separate its Beam liquor business and its home and security businesses into two companies later this year
The company says Titleist is the top-selling golf ball and a leader in golf clubs, while FootJoy is tops in golf shoes online cash advance.
The group buying the brands is led by Fila Korea and Mirae Asset Private Equity, Korea’s largest private equity firm.
Fortune expects to get $1.1 billion after taxes and expenses when the deal closes this summer.
The election of a majority Conservative government has generated much speculation about the future of digital policies in Canada. It is hard to project precisely what will happen; given the number of open cabinet positions it is not known whether Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore will remain in their portfolios or move elsewhere. If they stay the course, the Conservative digital policies are strong in a number of areas.
Concerns over the lack of competitiveness in the Canadian telecom market emerged as a campaign issue and a majority government may pave the way for removing foreign ownership restrictions in the telecom market. The Conservatives have consistently focused on improving the competitive environment, and opening the market is the right place to start to address both Internet access (including consumer frustration over usage-based billing) and wireless services.
Addressing the foreign competition issue will be only a piece of the bigger puzzle, however. The government has yet to set targets for universal broadband access and has been mum about the possibility of a set-aside for new entrants as part of the forthcoming spectrum auction. Answers to those questions may come from the much-anticipated digital economy strategy.
The Conservatives have a chance for some easy digital policy wins. Ending the Election Act rules that resulted in the Twitter ban on election night would receive broad support, as would maintaining their opposition to deeply unpopular proposals such as an iPod tax or new regulation of Internet video providers like Netflix.
On the hot button issue of copyright reform, it appears certain that Canada will pass a bill on the fourth try. The last bill had its flaws
Some day, America’s shrunken job market is going to boom again. When that happens, expect a “tsunami of résumés” hitting HR offices around the country, along with a thunderous pounding of feet as dissatisfied employees head out their employers’ door for good.
So says Dr. Ronald Leopold, vice president of U.S. Business for MetLife.
The insurance firm surveyed 1,400 employees and 1,500 business executives last fall on their work attitudes. The American worker, they found, is ticked off and hoping to bail out.
“This year’s findings reveal a workforce that has grown more dissatisfied and disloyal, to the point where a startling one in three employees hopes to be working elsewhere in the next 12 months,” the study said.
That’s not surprising after three years of recession, layoffs, wage cuts and benefit reductions. Some companies treat employees like light bulbs. Burn them out; throw them away.
“Employees aren’t feeling the love,” says Leopold. Instead, they’re feeling the whip. According to the study, 40 percent of us worked harder last year, while 25 percent felt less secure in their jobs.
“These burnt-out employees are the most likely to say that they hope to be working elsewhere in 2011,” the study said.
For the moment, employers can ignore this. There aren’t many jobs to flee to.
Workers “hold on like little barnacles to the side of the ship when things are bad. As soon as things loosen up, they’ll go,” says Rose Jonas, who bills her Clayton career coaching business as the Job Doctor.
Employers are still concentrating on cutting costs (you and I are costs), and not worrying much about how they’ll retain workers when the boom resumes.
That might be a mistake. “When people leave an organization, the top achievers leave first,” notes David Hults, a Sunset Hills career coach.
Unemployment is coming down
The fate of former strongman Laurent Gbagbo, who turned mortar shells and rockets on his people, will be an indicator of how calls for reconciliation play out in this West African nation blighted by tribal, religious and land rivalries.
Ivory Coast’s new leader _ installed at the cost of thousands of lives _ is calling for reconciliation in the country, but says that cannot come at the price of justice.
President Alassane Ouattara has said impunity for Gbagbo and those who fomented violence is out of the question, a clear challenge to a practice that often reigns in Africa for those who fall from power.
Ouattara wants the 65-year-old Gbagbo to be tried in national and international courts.
At least one other African leader says Gbagbo should be allowed to live peacefully in exile. Another says he should be able to retire to a farm in Ivory Coast.
His supporters say without his release, there cannot be reconciliation.
Gbagbo was arrested April 11 and is now under house arrest in the country’s northern Korhogo town, Ouattara’s stronghold. His wife Simone, who at one point was being investigated by the United Nations for human rights abuses including organizing death squads, is being held separately in the northwest town of Odienne.
The bad blood between Ouattara and Gbagbo goes back decades. Ouattara oversaw Gbagbo’s arrest on charges of inciting violence in 1992, when Ouattara was prime minister and Gbagbo a beleaguered opposition leader. Gbagbo was tried and sentenced to two years in prison but was released after six months.
Gbagbo took power in 2000 in elections boycotted by all other opposition parties, a sore point among Ouattara supporters. An attempted coup in 2002 ballooned into a rebellion that divided the country between a rebel-held north and government-run south. Gbagbo repeatedly delayed promised elections.
Nov. 28 elections were supposed to reunite the nation that once was a symbol of progress and prosperity on the continent.
Though Gbagbo lost, nearly half of the electorate voted for him. Ouattara bagged 54 percent of votes, Gbagbo 46 percent. Refusing to accept his defeat, Gbagbo took a last stand in Abidjan, as former rebel forces swept down from the north in a lightning assault,
Ouattara, very conscious that Gbagbo still enjoys a lot of support in Ivory Coast and not wanting to make a martyr of him, gave orders that he was to be taken alive at all costs.
Senegal warned against impunity last week. Senegal’s Foreign Affairs Minister Madicke Niang told reporters in Ivory Coast: “Being against all forms of impunity, we must find the means, soon, to ensure that such acts never again see the light of day.”
But the nation appears to be selective about who should be punished. For years Senegal has resisted African and other international pressure to try ousted President Hissene Habre, who is accused of thousands of political killings and systematic torture when he ruled Chad, from 1982 to 1990, before fleeing to Senegal.
Botswana’s President Ian Khama said Ivorians should just let Gbagbo retire to a farm, even though he had taken a hard line against the intransigent leader.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, himself the victim of an electoral crisis in which more than 1,000 Kenyans died in a conflict rooted in old tribal and land rivalries, last week suggested that Gbagbo should be allowed to go into exile.
Odinga was widely seen as the victor in December 2007 elections but agreed to form a power-sharing government to halt the bloodshed.
The Kenyan prime minister, who admitted Gbagbo is a friend, acknowledged that he failed in his role as an African Union mediator to convince Gbagbo to step down to save the lives of innocents.
“Mr. Gbagbo had quite a lot of support in the last elections. The situation in the Ivory Coast is fairly complex. You have got this north and south divide, you have got the religious divide and you have also the ethnic divide and all that needs to be resolved,” he said on CNN television network.
“I really don’t want to see a situation where Mr. Gbagbo becomes a hero in trial,” he said.
The death toll caused by Gbagbo’s refusal to step down peacefully will probably never be known. As people began emerging from homes in which they had locked themselves for two weeks and more as the city was besieged, have been seen burning decomposing corpses. Others have collected bodies of family members from overflowing morgues where no records were kept.
Few doubt the man with the most blood on his hands is Gbagbo.
About 30 members of Gbagbo’s Cabinet, party and family are under house arrest and U.N. protection in an unlooted family home in Grand Bassam, the seaside resort near Abidjan that is Simone Gbagbo’s birth place.
The arrested president of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front party, Pascal Affi N’Guessan, on Saturday sneaked out a news release calling for “the liberation of the president, Laurent Gbagbo, and all the other political prisoners.”
Gbagbo’s rabble-rousing youth minister Charles Ble Goude, who spoke before going into hiding, also warned that “there can be no reconciliation” without Gbagbo.