Wednesday, March 23, 2011
In case anyone is still visiting this blog ...
I stopped updating this blog last year, and I am no longer writing for Mad Mike's. You can now find my volunteer prose poetry and musings at RoundTree7, where I have posted today.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Hey, I'm over at Mad Mike's
Stimpson Writes has been put on ice, probably forever. But you can still catch me at MMA, where I deliver wisdom on pop culture every Friday. Click [link deleted by author, July 2011]for today's post.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Earth Day Haikus
Green and blue planet
Chokes, and feels nausea
Senses a tumor
Multinational
Says it's as green as can be
But we know better
Newspaper reports
Skinny bears up north, poisoned
Lake Superior
Never back down when
Standing up for your planet
Or for your people
That last verse paraphrases something I heard Natalie Pa'apa'a say at last year's Winnipeg jazz festival.
Chokes, and feels nausea
Senses a tumor
Multinational
Says it's as green as can be
But we know better
Newspaper reports
Skinny bears up north, poisoned
Lake Superior
Never back down when
Standing up for your planet
Or for your people
That last verse paraphrases something I heard Natalie Pa'apa'a say at last year's Winnipeg jazz festival.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
City water plan: bad idea
Monday's WFP had a cautionary piece by the head of the Parkland Institute about "corporatization" of city services.
Winnipeg's neoconservative mayor and his council junta have put the city on a path to having water and waste services delivered and controlled by a private-sector "partner."
Edmonton did the same thing to its water and electric utilities in the 1990s, passing control of those services to a company called Epcor. Now, writes Ricardo Acuna, Edmonton city council and Edmontonians generally have effectively no say in those vital public services.
"This loss of control is exacerbated by the fact that as a private business, all of the corporate utility's plans, dealings and major decisions are covered by protection of privacy legislation," he notes. "Operating as a private entity in a private marketplace, all strategic decisions are considered proprietary and as such are made beyond the oversight of the public at large."
He points out that the public interest is unimportant to profit-seeking firms. "A private corporation is bound by law to maximize return to its shareholder and cannot legally undertake any activities that will knowingly have a negative impact on its dividends. Where a city-managed and controlled utility can make strategic decisions to benefit the environment or the public interest even though it might lose money, a private corporation cannot."
Note to the Free Press: This is is what all the fuss was about last summer when people were protesting Mayor Katz's plan. Get it?
Winnipeg's neoconservative mayor and his council junta have put the city on a path to having water and waste services delivered and controlled by a private-sector "partner."
Edmonton did the same thing to its water and electric utilities in the 1990s, passing control of those services to a company called Epcor. Now, writes Ricardo Acuna, Edmonton city council and Edmontonians generally have effectively no say in those vital public services.
"This loss of control is exacerbated by the fact that as a private business, all of the corporate utility's plans, dealings and major decisions are covered by protection of privacy legislation," he notes. "Operating as a private entity in a private marketplace, all strategic decisions are considered proprietary and as such are made beyond the oversight of the public at large."
He points out that the public interest is unimportant to profit-seeking firms. "A private corporation is bound by law to maximize return to its shareholder and cannot legally undertake any activities that will knowingly have a negative impact on its dividends. Where a city-managed and controlled utility can make strategic decisions to benefit the environment or the public interest even though it might lose money, a private corporation cannot."
Note to the Free Press: This is is what all the fuss was about last summer when people were protesting Mayor Katz's plan. Get it?
Monday, March 22, 2010
Just One Vote in the running
Nice to see Ian Stewart's book about the 1986 St. Vital NDP nomination contest has been shortlisted for a McWilliams Award.
Good luck, Mr. Stewart.
Good luck, Mr. Stewart.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
On top and in control
Published in Bar & Beverage Business Magazine, Winter 2010:
An online dictionary defines inventory control as "supervision of the delivery, availability, and utilization of an organization's inventory in an attempt to ensure adequate supplies and at the same time minimize expenses caused by theft, spoilage or excessive stock."
For bar operators, the term can be defined more simply as knowing what you’ve ordered, what you paid, and how much you've used.
Knowing those things is the key to maximizing efficiency by seeing that, as near as possible, the volume of product you bought equals the volume sold.
Any shortfall between inventory and volume sold is reflected in your establishment's profit. Or, as Fraser Brooks of InfoSpec Systems (maker of Profitek software) so succinctly puts it, "Anything you can do to reduce that shortage goes right smack dab on your bottom line."
So inventory control includes keeping track of purchases, keeping track of your bar’s sales, knowing when to order more supplies, and trying to prevent “slippage” in what you have in stock.
You might say it’s a mighty tall order. Fortunately, Canadian companies are ready and able to help out with products and services to make inventory control much easier.
CLR Concepts’ Leena Lowe distinguishes purchasing control – knowing what you've bought and when to buy more – from the rest of inventory control. In fact, she thinks of them as pretty much separate things.
Purchasing control is obviously crucial to running a successful business, she says, as "you never ever want to be in a position where you’ve purchased too much, because that’s just costing you money. And you never want to be in a position where you haven’t purchased enough, because then you’re losing sales.
“Inventory control is tied into it,” she continues from her office near Vancouver, “but it’s kind of a different question.
“When I hear people talking about inventory control, what I’m really hearing is them saying ‘What am I going to do to make sure that my inventory is not walking out the door?’ That’s a whole different question.”
Inventory loss can come in other forms, of course. Some may be lost to everyday spillage, for instance. But industry research has shown theft and fraud to be taking a sizeable bite out of bar and restaurant revenues.
Lowe often hears bar operators express concern about how much profit is being lost due to employee dishonesty.
“I guess the question then is, How do you control your inventory? And the only way you can do that is by monitoring the usage. And that’s where it ties into purchasing, because if you purchased 30 cases of Budweiser and you, according to your computer, have sold five cases, you should have 25 cases left. If you don’t, you have an issue.”
Lowe says Clear POS, made and sold by CLR Concepts, has proven a useful ally in inventory control.
Clear POS includes inventory control as “an integral part of the program,” Lowe says. “When you have a choice between buying our POS system and somebody else’s, often ours is not necessarily the cheapest. The reason people go for ours is quite often the inventory control. It tracks inventory very well and very simply.”
By keeping a record of what your business has sold, all POS software – whether the brand name is Profitek, Clear, Squirrel or what have you – helps with inventory control. Aloha goes a step further with its Restaurant Guard, a supplementary product which analyses transaction patterns to find possible fraud and theft.
Bill Tischner of Edmonton-based Time Business Technologies points out that studies indicate about five per cent of bar and restaurant revenue is lost to theft by staff.
“That’s five per cent of their gross sales," he underscores. “Not their net – their gross sales. That’s a significant dollar amount that’s going into the bartenders’ jeans and the servers’ jeans through what you call industry scams.”
Tischner relates that when he operated restaurants, he observed significant inventory gaps that he chalked up to spillage and the like – honest mistakes.
“Now that I work on this side of the fence I can see that it is mostly staff theft. So the bartenders are getting rich and the owners are going broke.”
Aloha Restaurant Guard, which got its Canadian launch last year at a trade show in Vancouver, is a web-based product sold by Time that forensically audits transactions for potentially fraudulent activities.
Restaurant Guard monitors transactions and analyses them for signs of such common fraudulent practices as the “wagon wheel” scam. In that style of theft, a server collects in full on a bill, then subtracts a commonly ordered item (say, a fountain drink) before putting cash in the till, then transfers that item to the another table’s bill. The process is continued throughout a shift so that the server collects several times on the item but the establishment gets paid just once, with the server pocketing the rest.
Clients get weekly reports on suspicious activity.
Tischner says one client estimates Restaurant Guard is saving his Alberta restaurant chain as much as $500,000 annually in losses. “The monthly fee that he’s paying for Restaurant Guard, he saves in one day in what would have been losses.”
The product also spares the owner from spending a lot of time every week auditing transactions in an effort to spot theft and fraud.
Another effective tool for minimizing slippage is a liquor control system such as those made by Azbar Inc.
Azbar’s product line includes the AzGun, which dispenses up to 18 liquids according to pre-programmed portion sizes, and the AzJunior control station for small operators, as well as cocktail towers and draft beer dispensers. The Quebec City-based company also has a POS system.
The AzGun can let a bar’s inventory control system know to subtract from the volume level for each product, so that management knows which products should be replenished soon.
Company founder and president Robert Blouin says Azbar has, in its 20-plus years, became a North American leader in liquor control because of the high quality of its products.
“We’re the best in the world right now,” he proclaims, “and I want to stay that way.”
An online dictionary defines inventory control as "supervision of the delivery, availability, and utilization of an organization's inventory in an attempt to ensure adequate supplies and at the same time minimize expenses caused by theft, spoilage or excessive stock."
For bar operators, the term can be defined more simply as knowing what you’ve ordered, what you paid, and how much you've used.
Knowing those things is the key to maximizing efficiency by seeing that, as near as possible, the volume of product you bought equals the volume sold.
Any shortfall between inventory and volume sold is reflected in your establishment's profit. Or, as Fraser Brooks of InfoSpec Systems (maker of Profitek software) so succinctly puts it, "Anything you can do to reduce that shortage goes right smack dab on your bottom line."
So inventory control includes keeping track of purchases, keeping track of your bar’s sales, knowing when to order more supplies, and trying to prevent “slippage” in what you have in stock.
You might say it’s a mighty tall order. Fortunately, Canadian companies are ready and able to help out with products and services to make inventory control much easier.
In and out
CLR Concepts’ Leena Lowe distinguishes purchasing control – knowing what you've bought and when to buy more – from the rest of inventory control. In fact, she thinks of them as pretty much separate things.
Purchasing control is obviously crucial to running a successful business, she says, as "you never ever want to be in a position where you’ve purchased too much, because that’s just costing you money. And you never want to be in a position where you haven’t purchased enough, because then you’re losing sales.
“Inventory control is tied into it,” she continues from her office near Vancouver, “but it’s kind of a different question.
“When I hear people talking about inventory control, what I’m really hearing is them saying ‘What am I going to do to make sure that my inventory is not walking out the door?’ That’s a whole different question.”
Inventory loss can come in other forms, of course. Some may be lost to everyday spillage, for instance. But industry research has shown theft and fraud to be taking a sizeable bite out of bar and restaurant revenues.
Lowe often hears bar operators express concern about how much profit is being lost due to employee dishonesty.
“I guess the question then is, How do you control your inventory? And the only way you can do that is by monitoring the usage. And that’s where it ties into purchasing, because if you purchased 30 cases of Budweiser and you, according to your computer, have sold five cases, you should have 25 cases left. If you don’t, you have an issue.”
Lowe says Clear POS, made and sold by CLR Concepts, has proven a useful ally in inventory control.
Clear POS includes inventory control as “an integral part of the program,” Lowe says. “When you have a choice between buying our POS system and somebody else’s, often ours is not necessarily the cheapest. The reason people go for ours is quite often the inventory control. It tracks inventory very well and very simply.”
On guard
By keeping a record of what your business has sold, all POS software – whether the brand name is Profitek, Clear, Squirrel or what have you – helps with inventory control. Aloha goes a step further with its Restaurant Guard, a supplementary product which analyses transaction patterns to find possible fraud and theft.
Bill Tischner of Edmonton-based Time Business Technologies points out that studies indicate about five per cent of bar and restaurant revenue is lost to theft by staff.
“That’s five per cent of their gross sales," he underscores. “Not their net – their gross sales. That’s a significant dollar amount that’s going into the bartenders’ jeans and the servers’ jeans through what you call industry scams.”
Tischner relates that when he operated restaurants, he observed significant inventory gaps that he chalked up to spillage and the like – honest mistakes.
“Now that I work on this side of the fence I can see that it is mostly staff theft. So the bartenders are getting rich and the owners are going broke.”
Aloha Restaurant Guard, which got its Canadian launch last year at a trade show in Vancouver, is a web-based product sold by Time that forensically audits transactions for potentially fraudulent activities.
Restaurant Guard monitors transactions and analyses them for signs of such common fraudulent practices as the “wagon wheel” scam. In that style of theft, a server collects in full on a bill, then subtracts a commonly ordered item (say, a fountain drink) before putting cash in the till, then transfers that item to the another table’s bill. The process is continued throughout a shift so that the server collects several times on the item but the establishment gets paid just once, with the server pocketing the rest.
Clients get weekly reports on suspicious activity.
Tischner says one client estimates Restaurant Guard is saving his Alberta restaurant chain as much as $500,000 annually in losses. “The monthly fee that he’s paying for Restaurant Guard, he saves in one day in what would have been losses.”
The product also spares the owner from spending a lot of time every week auditing transactions in an effort to spot theft and fraud.
Another effective tool for minimizing slippage is a liquor control system such as those made by Azbar Inc.
Azbar’s product line includes the AzGun, which dispenses up to 18 liquids according to pre-programmed portion sizes, and the AzJunior control station for small operators, as well as cocktail towers and draft beer dispensers. The Quebec City-based company also has a POS system.
The AzGun can let a bar’s inventory control system know to subtract from the volume level for each product, so that management knows which products should be replenished soon.
Company founder and president Robert Blouin says Azbar has, in its 20-plus years, became a North American leader in liquor control because of the high quality of its products.
“We’re the best in the world right now,” he proclaims, “and I want to stay that way.”
Thursday, February 18, 2010
An update on that Belgian case
I commented in November on the case of a Belgian man who was supposedly "communicating" after several years in a coma.
Skeptics were saying Rom Houben's pronouncements via keyboard were really a case of "facilitated communication," a widely discredited process.
Someone I know shrugged and said "Maybe" when I mentioned this to her. She wasn't convinced Houben's communication was a hoax.
Well, I've just read news that the physician at the centre of it all has admitted he was mistaken. Dr. Steven Laureys has looked into it and concluded "that it wasn't Houben doing the writing after all," Der Spiegel reports.
Funny how the debunking of this "miracle" case isn't getting as much mainstream news coverage as the original story. Not nearly as sexy to report that the coma guy isn't communicating after all, I suppose. And journalists don't like to admit they were hoodwinked (again) by pseudoscience.
Skeptics were saying Rom Houben's pronouncements via keyboard were really a case of "facilitated communication," a widely discredited process.
Someone I know shrugged and said "Maybe" when I mentioned this to her. She wasn't convinced Houben's communication was a hoax.
Well, I've just read news that the physician at the centre of it all has admitted he was mistaken. Dr. Steven Laureys has looked into it and concluded "that it wasn't Houben doing the writing after all," Der Spiegel reports.
Funny how the debunking of this "miracle" case isn't getting as much mainstream news coverage as the original story. Not nearly as sexy to report that the coma guy isn't communicating after all, I suppose. And journalists don't like to admit they were hoodwinked (again) by pseudoscience.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The end is near
Two years have passed since I started this blog. I believe the time has come to wind it down. Starting now, posts here will be less frequent and then cease altogether in a couple of months.
My traffic numbers simply don't justify the time I spend on this blog. I must instead focus on improving my income, which has been rather scant of late.
For the few who do give a darn about this blog, I'll say that I'm not leaving the blogosphere. I'm setting up a much more low-maintenance blog that will serve as a repository or gallery for some of my published work, and I'll still visit blogs and contribute to Mad Mike's America.
In short, this is both an end and a beginning.
My traffic numbers simply don't justify the time I spend on this blog. I must instead focus on improving my income, which has been rather scant of late.
For the few who do give a darn about this blog, I'll say that I'm not leaving the blogosphere. I'm setting up a much more low-maintenance blog that will serve as a repository or gallery for some of my published work, and I'll still visit blogs and contribute to Mad Mike's America.
In short, this is both an end and a beginning.
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