Even More Stories Now

I am writing a lot more stories these days on my Website than I ever expected. Oh, it is not because I don't like writing stories or there is nothing to write about but because I thought that I would be doing a lot of outside exercising to help me with my physical illness issues. That would take up a good part of my day as it did in the summer hours last year when I spent several hours a day quite often walking in my neighbourhood not only enjoying the weather, but helping myself get better. 

That would mean obviously, that I would not have the same amount of time to do articles. Accordingly, I would not be posting as many. However, we have experienced a rather cold winter, much worse than the last few years. It has been so bad that I have only been out for a walk once this year. I just cannot take the risk of getting ill because of the low temperature. What that means is I have to do something to take up the time of my day. That has turned into writing many more Blogs than I expected.

I hope that you are enjoying what I am writing and that you will continue reading what I am saying to you. I cannot promise exactly what I'm going to do when the weather gets better, but I still will try very hard to provide to you as many interesting stories as I can.

Now here are a few more of my articles for you to consider.

OTHER PLACES TO BUILD A NEW BRIDGE

I wonder if the Federal Government really knows that the only place for a 2nd bridge to be built across the River is where the Ambassador Bridge Company wants to do so. I wonder if their own research suggests that where they are saying that they want to build a new bridge just will not be feasible.

I made a comment on a website about a bridge matter that might happen and then had another writer make a very strong comment which may well provide the truth about why the Government project will not work. I have heard something about this in the past and, who knows, it may be absolutely correct. Here is our exchange of information on March 7. By the way, I am not telling you who made this comment:

"Comment by Ed Arditti:

Can anything be built on top of this:

Men work in the salt mines underneath Detroit in this undated photo. This gigantic mine, 1,200 feet beneath the surface, spreads out over more than 1,400 acres with 50 miles of roads. (Detroit News Archives)"

"Comment by reader:

That's the multi-billion dollar question. I remember a cop laughing at me when I suggested they might try to put a bridge thru Brighton Beach one day. He said everyone knows the place is riddled with mine tunnels; the ground is too unstable to carry the foundations. It would be the last place ever considered for a bridge..."

This person might just be correct that the only alternative is to build a 2nd Ambassador Bridge right beside the existing one!  If that is true, then there was no chance ever for a competitive bridge to be built by the Government. Perhaps, that is why the Ambassador Bridge Company has acted in such a strong position knowing it could not be wiped out.

GROCERY DELIVERY SERVICE

It is just amazing to me. It is just like the grocery business that I experienced in Toronto as a child when I was very young. That was over 60 years ago.

My parents did all of the grocery shopping themselves. Quite often, I went along with them to the local small grocery stores in our area to help them buy what they needed and, to be sure, to buy some of the products that I liked. Most of the time they took the groceries back to our home by carrying them in their cart where they put the bags. Every so often though, they asked the owner to deliver the purchases to our house because we could not carry so many goods in our grocery cart.  They did so within a relatively short period of time and did not charge us for doing so.

I don't remember us doing that ever at one of the large grocery chain stores because I do not recall them ever offering such a service. However, it has changed now. As I have written before, and now saw another story about it, it looks like the grocery store chains are now entering into a service to deliver purchased groceries from their operations to their clients.

I am giving you some information about my background in case one of the grocery chains tries to make it appear that they are doing something so novel right now. They are not. They are merely doing what has been done before and what they need to do now to stay profitable and to try to get more customers to deal with them.

Here is what I saw recently:

"Busy consumers will soon have one more way to avoid going to the grocery store as Canadian retailers ramp up their e-commerce offerings in an apparent effort to beat tech titan Amazon, which recently entered the country’s grocery market.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. announced Monday it will launch a new service in the spring that allows commuters to order groceries online and pick them up at one of five Go Transit stations in the Greater Toronto Area the next day.

“This is a logical extension of our increasingly popular e-commerce services, and the growing customer appeal for ordering groceries online and picking them up when it’s most convenient,” said Jeremy Pee, the company’s senior vice-president of e-commerce, in a statement." (CanadianPress, February 26, 2018) 

I tell you what is interesting to me and to people who are as old as I am. It is not that so many new things are all of a sudden being created and starting right now. Rather, activities that were successfully carried on in the past and then abandoned for whatever reason are now being brought back to help the purchasers carry on their lives more easily.

The only significant difference may be the cost of what was being done at no cost in the past!

AN INTERESTING REAL ESTATE COMMENT I READ

As an older gentleman who has been around for a good number of years, I have been involved in the real estate market not buying houses to make money but rather to find a place to live for my family.

I remember when I bought my first place, a 2 bedroom condominium apartment in Toronto. It was quite a nice unit that I really liked at the time.  I have to admit that I did not really know what a good price for my unit was, but its price at the time seemed very reasonable. 

That was not a big deal for me because the price of units like mine literally skyrocketed to almost doubling within a very short few months after my purchase. In fact, the contractor who built my unit sold many units very quickly in a new condominium project that it just had completed. I heard that some of the purchasers bought several units in order to make, I assumed, a considerable sum of money when they resold them.

Unfortunately, that did not last very long. The Ontario Government introduced some legislation that effectively killed the real estate market! Prices immediately dropped in a very short period of time almost back to the price that I paid for my unit a mere few months before. Just as you should know, as happened then and has happened subsequently, after this market crash, it took a very long time for the prices to increase again. However, when they did, they zoomed up again!

Is the same thing finally happening in our region now? I am sure that, if you have been reading the media articles recently, you will see how high the prices have hit in so many areas of the Province. They have zoomed upwards to very high figures.  That has not happened here in our area as quickly but over the last little they have certainly started getting higher and higher in price to where people are making big dollars in profit.

Just take a look at this comment made by a real estate agent in our area recently, so you will see what I mean:

"There are lots of buyers, and next to no homes to sell them.  

Once of the oldest agents in town was just telling me yesterday this is the first time in his career that he has zero listings. And he's been selling since 1956! Our … Team usually carries over 50 listings, and we currently have about 12, and the vast majority of those are commercial, 3 residential. We can't even keep income properties out there, one of our team specialties, as they sell super fast as well… 

(And no, prices aren't coming down, unless something akin to a global catastrophe occurs. We still have the most affordable real estate in Canada, the highest net disposable incomes, the lowest unemployment rates, and why do you think they're building two new international bridges and an international rail tunnel? They are predicting long term growth for this area.)"

I guess that people think that their homes will be worth even more in a few months and have therefore decided not to sell until that time. Of course, the question to ask is whether they have they considered what it will cost them to buy a new unit to replace it.

Just think about how this works out. If you are a resident in a house in the Toronto area and want to move down here, you will make a fortune. There is no doubt that you probably will make a nice profit on the sale of your property in Toronto if you can do so now. You can probably buy a unit in our area of the same size or even larger at a fraction of your Toronto price. In other words, you can be making a huge profit whereby not only have you paid cash for your unit here but have a nice sum of money left over that you can use for your retired life.

Let us see what happens in our real estate market. It should be quite interesting.