Month: December 2010

If you haven’t used it, you’ve probably heard of it. If you haven’t heard of it, get out from under that rock and hit up Groupon.com, the daily deal site that’s been taking the world by storm. Groupon is one of the world’s fastest growing businesses, offering its users a new deal every day on goods and services for 50% to 90% off. Needless to say, in today’s economic climate, Groupon has found itself one heck of a niche.

You’d think a money-saving site like Groupon would recognize a great deal when it hit it in the face. However, this turned out not to be the case when Groupon CEO and founder Andrew Mason turned down Google’s $6 billion offer to buy the company. While Mason is notorious for his prankster ways, this is no laughing matter. Declining not only $6 billion, but also the tech services and network of the largest search engine in the world, most believe, could not have been a smart move for the internet-based thrift site. So will Groupon, like so many predecessors, flail, having turned down an offer of a lifetime? Or, like Facebook, grow to an extent beyond Google and all the search engines in the world could fathom? Only time will tell. Click. Tock. Click. Tock.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-06/groupon-prankster-mason-not-joking-in-spurning-google-s-6-billion-offer.html

There are 19 days until Christmas, and I feel… nothing.

Where’s the snow? Where are the lights? Where are the tacky plastic decorations? It seems as though the older we get, the less noticeable holidays become. I don’t know if holiday cheer is actually hitting an all time low… But it scares me.

To think of children ending their elementary school day in mid-December without the twinkle of Christmas lights lining the streets or the airy frosty nip of snow is too heartbreaking. This is not the Christmas I know and love.

However, the most imperceptible, yet one of the biggest differences between this holiday season and the ghosts of Christmases past, at least for me, has been the absence of holiday shoppers. I miss the people scurrying around the city streets clutching shiny, colourful carrier bags, and checking their lists with clumsy mittens. I miss the hubbub of kids throwing snowballs and grandparents drinking hot chocolate and the sound of cash registers.

I know it’s wrong to associate Christmas solely with retail, but I can’t help but to notice how the economic climate has put a damper on my holiday hamper. They say Canada was least affected by the financial crisis, but the lack of shoppers on the streets of this retail ghost town has this December looking a lot more like Halloween than Christmas.

Everybody’s had an earful of the currency battle between the loonie and the dollar. I, for one, have had enough. Sure, it was nice to rub it in the Americans’ faces a few months ago when our loonie matched the dollar and exceeded it – for about 5 minutes. How is it that after years and years of we-almost-made-it-on-par-with-the-States-but-not-completely, we’re still holding our breath for something as trivial as $0.001? Even Firas Askari, head currency trader at BMO’s Toronto unit wrote, “I don’t see too much happening in the loonie ahead of tomorrow.” Thanks, Firas, but I could have told Bloomberg Newsweek the same thing… about five months ago. I, personally, am bored of hearing that the loonie slid an infinitesimally inconsequential amount on Dec. 3, or that we were, yet again, just within however many decimal points to matching the dollar. To the government and the Bank of Canada: if you’re going to go on about the loonie, please try doing something in the economy that will actually have an effect quantified at more than a hundredth of a cent, or that lasts longer than one day’s trading period. In the meantime, to Chapters: I want to know why this hundredth of a cent means I’m paying $8 more than the USD price for my copy of “Tales of Beedle the Bard.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-06/loonie-falls-from-almost-three-week-high-before-bank-of-canada-s-meeting.html

In class, we learned that for entrepreneurial small businesses, a lack of capital is usually the sole reason for failure. However, what are some of the reasons that small businesses may lack start-up capital? There’s the obvious fact that since these businesses are start-ups, they have very little repute with investors of any kind, let alone banks, and are highly unlikely to be backed by grayhairs, especially if the entrepreneurs in question are relatively young. But is it possible that (in the States at least), some small businesses suffer from a lack of capital because racism and sexism? The findings from a US-government led study shows that businesses owned by African-American females tend to be more poorly funded than most small businesses belonging to their white and/or male counterparts. It’s interesting that while every American politician, at least for the last half-century or so, has championed ethnic and gender minorities, not to mention small businesses, American banks still hold to the social views of olde. In a country where banks and government are practically one in the same, are all men truly created “equal?” Maybe in the eyes of “their Creator,” sure, but when it comes to applying for a bank loan? So help you God.

http://www.economist.com/whichmba/minority-entrepreneurs