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Comment on Ziyu He’s blog: http://blogs.ubc.ca/rita2275/2014/10/05/new-gourmet-burger-in-australias-mcdonalds/

Lack of innovation has always been a weakness of McDonald’s, but recently, McDonald’s in western Sydney shows people an upgraded approach of ordering which customers can choose their own preferences with touch screens displaying 19 options for different ingredients and toppings.

The internal weakness of McDonald’s will be turned into a strength if the customer responds to this new approach is positive. The change McDonald’s made also shows us technology are getting into every single part of life and business, more high-technological elements are added into food industry. This means the process of ordering food in restaurants will be more easily in the future and the cost of labor will be reduced. However, it may cause an increasing unemployment rate in workers without advanced professional skills as the increasing usage of technology.

As s world famous fast food giant, this innovation makes McDonald’s more competitive by attracting more customers and shortening cunstomer waiting time. However, McDonald’s have to consider carefullly aboout the high cost of those touch screens to make it sustainable.

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Amazon Launches Same-Day Delivery In Toronto And Vancouver

Amazon recently launched its one-day delivery service in Toronto and Vancouver, which guarantees that some of their merchandise can be delivered before 9p.m. local time on the same day if the purchase was made the noon.
As a fan of online shopping, I can not believe how many benefits are brought with the launch of this new service in Canada. People no longer need to worry about the opening hours of malls on weekends or holidays because they can simply get what they want by some clicks on Amazon, and get them home at the end of the day with services seven days a week. Also, the service will increase the number of Amazon customers and expand their market because of the high convenience. It is a signal of innovation as well, and we can simply the prediction that the method of online shopping will be more and more convenient in the future.

However, this new service also brings Amazon an increasing cost of all, if Amazon can not handle the relationship between the benefits and the cost of same-day shipping, problems will appear soon.

http://forexreportdaily.com/2013/10/31/canadian-dollar-falls-as-oil-discount-reaches-eight-month-high/

Canadian dollar keeps falling due to the drop of oil price these days. As international students studying in Canada,  my friend and I pay a lot of attention on the exchange rate of Canadian dollars and Chinese Yuan because it really affects our lives.

It is hard to define if it is a positive or negative issue. For new immigrants and international students from all over the world, it does bring some benefits such as saving some money when transferring from their own currency to Canadian dollars. When Canadian dollar was rising before, the unemployment rate rose as well, and the export from Canada decreased a lot. The falling of Canadian dollars may relieve those situations in some cases.

However, people are not really confident on the recovery of manufacturing and exporting industries in Canada during the falling of Canadian dollars. There are so many uncertainties in the value of the currencies the exchange rate change, we can probably have more hopes on the improvement of economic climate.

Comment on Vanessa Friedman’s blog: http://runway.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/alexander-wang-for-hm-became-a-case-study-in-anticipation/?_r=0

The selected stores of H&M were crazily full with people who came to get their Alexander Wang X H&M collection. The brand new collection is as popular as any other designer collection of H&M, an d people were not surprised when they were sold out on the first day, and the online part were sold out the next morning.

The collaboration brought huge benefits to both H&M and Alexander Wang. I have seen a survey about why people buy the designer collection, more than sixty percentage of them choose that because they can get Alexander Wang at a quarter of the original price. Therefore, as a luxury brand, Alexander Wang can put themselves into public consciousness and expand their market. As for the High Street brand H&M, this collaboration leads them to  a new platform which H&M and make both high-end and less-expensive designs.

The writer mentioned a question in her blog, “Does it mean that in the context of limited-edition collaborations, the early bird does not necessarily get the worm?” I believe it depends on how people are into the collection, how much they like it, and if they think it worths waiting.

Comment on Xinyuan Wang’s blog: http://blogs.ubc.ca/xinyuanwang/2014/09/09/business-ethics-in-starbucks/

http://www.justmeans.com/blogs/starbucks-most-unethical-coffee-chain-in-the-uk

Business ethics is about applying and examining ethics in the business environment. In the case provided in the website above, as the giant of the coffee market, they did not fulfill their business ethic because of the GM growth hormone in their milk which threaten customers’ health.

As Xinyuan mentioned in her blog, “business ethics is related to every individual, to all stakeholders.” The GM growth hormone product Starbucks provided was a negative example of business ethics. It did bring  Starbucks a large number of profits and benefit their stakeholders in some cases, but customers’ benefit can not be guaranteed.

The spokesperson of Starbucks claimed that they were “offering industry-leading environmental performance in coffee production.” This announcement did redeem their business image a little, but I believe the customers’ health must be one of the most significant sources and the basic thing to run their company.