Hershey's kiss-off

On February 16th, Hershey announced that they intend to close their chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario. The factory is about an hour-and-a-half's drive from my home in Ottawa, and as careful planning would have it—I was there today. (The photo of a lamp post that I took, shown to the left, provides some evidence of this.)

Like most members of our species, I have—shall we say—"a thing" for chocolate, and Hershey's make some very delectable chocolate treats. I happily carted home several kilos of the stuff from the Hershey Chocolate Shoppe that is attached to the factory. The Visitor's Center also features a "free self-guided tour from an elevated viewing gallery" to see the treats in production, which is pretty cool.

What isn't so cool is that a total of about 500 people will lose their jobs with the closure of the factory. As I understand it, 100 positions have already been eliminated and eventually about 400 more people will lose their jobs.

Incidentally, the population of Smiths Falls is roughly 10,000. The closure is expected to be devasting to the town. The outrage has only just begun.

This is only part of what Hershey calls a "Global Supply Chain Transformation". One of the cornerstones of this program is to:

Construct a flexible, cost-effective production facility in Monterrey, Mexico to meet current and emerging marketplace needs.

Hmmm ... "cost effective". Umm, does that include all the costs?

Here are a couple of other lines selected not-entirely at random from Hershey's description of how they plan to transform their global supply chain. First:

The program will result in a total net reduction of approximately 1,500 positions across Hershey's supply chain over the next three years.

And the second, a quote from David J. West, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer:

We recently announced a manufacturing joint venture in China with Lotte Confectionery Company, another step in our disciplined global expansion.

Update 29-Mar-2007: "Hope impedes retraining for Smiths Falls Hershey workers".

A model of decency, responsibility, courage

Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885–1954):

I could not have acted otherwise, and I therefore accept all that has befallen me with love.

Thought du jour from Log base 2

God didn't design humans. Natural selection did it for Her.

By the way, when I googled "thought du jour" just now, I got "about 23,100" results. Double by-the-way, does anyone have a roughly precise (if you know what I mean) notion of what Google means by "about x results"? Triple by-the-way, it almost goes without saying: props to Google!

Working for The Man

Note that the word "The" in the title of this post has a capital "T", because it's "The Man", not "the Man".

In 1962, Roy Orbison recorded "Working For The Man." Wikipedia says that the song is

about a mistreated laborer. After first thinking about killing the boss, the narrator later dreams of getting revenge by marrying his daughter and inheriting the business. In the final refrain, the eponymous hook is replaced with the line, "I'm gonna be The Man."

I wonder if there's a Brittanica entry for "The Man".

"For service in English, press 1 7"

I kid you not. (That's Bell Canada, by the way.) If I were writing a novel and I made that line up, my editor would say, "Come on, Nick, that's just not plausible."

As to why you have to press 1 7 for English, my best guess is as follows. Obviously for service in French, you must have to press 1 (after all, French is Canada's other official language). I'm guessing Inuktitut is 2, and if so, I applaud Bell Canada: it's about time Canada's First-Nations peoples got their proper respect. (You can probably see where I'm going with this: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, ... all the way up to 17.)

Enough cheap wisecracks ...

But at this point I think I'll skip the silly jokes and instead use the mention of proper respect for Canada's First-Nations peoples as an excuse to comment on what I think is perhaps Canada's greatest shame: the way native people here have been treated ever since the first contact by Europeans.

On any number of measures (perhaps the most appalling example being suicide rates, which are staggeringly high among native people), Canada's First-Nations peoples are in dire straits. I really don't know too much about all this, but what I do know is very disturbing. And I think it's time that we Canadians face up to our responsibilities.

I recognize that the problems are complex, and I certainly don't claim to know what's going to work. But I do suspect that non-aboriginal Canadians just haven't made this enough of a priority. Speaking for myself, I can say that I'm often far too busy pontificating about problems in other parts of the world (over which I generally have zero influence) to think about what I can do (and what privileges I may have to give up) to make a difference regarding the plight of Canada's First-Nations peoples. And if all this sounds just a bit precious—well, I think that's not really very important.

Pet peeves (continued): non-intuitive ballpoint pen caps

Some time ago I blogged about some of my pet peeves. There's something very therapeutic about actually writing down the things that bug you, and exactly what it is about them that is so maddening. Well, whaddaya know: I have a few more. Starting with ballpoint pens with caps whose colour doesn't match their ink.

As an aside, I wasn't sure how to spell whaddaya, and neither of the two spellcheckers I tried allowed that it is in fact a widely used word. But Google knew better: whadaya (with one d) gives 55,700 hits. But "did you mean: whaddaya?" Well — yes, because whaddaya (with two d's) gives 466,000 hits. Yay Google!

Your call is important to us ...

Is that really true? I mean, couldn't you hire just a few more customer service representatives? 'Cause then I might feel like my call really was important. Instead, I feel like I'm being fed a line. And that irritates me. Maybe I'm too hung up on words. I mean, maybe it's just semantics.

Ok, I'm going to cut the sarcasm. Truth is, I think that notwithstanding certain rather specific situations and all things being equal (which of course they never really are) people and corporations should be as honest as possible. It seems to me that this is a rather rich blogging vein. I could probably have a whole blog devoted to the subject. There probably already are several blogs devoted to the subject!

Update 10Feb2007: Another line that really bugs me:

Please be patient as we are experiencing an unusually large call volume ...