Blog

Ikea Doesn't Want My Money

April 08, 2011 11:12 +0000  |  Money Stupid People 2

In an effort to furnish my soon-to-be new home, I hit up Ikea and had a rather negative experience. I wrote them an email and thought that I'd share it here.

I wanted to give you money, a lot of money in fact, but your staff have made it clear that you don't want it.

I've just moved to the Netherlands and find myself in need of furnishings for my new apartment. I need to fill my new home with everything from a bed, to a couch to knives and forks and so I thought it best to go to Ikea. I thought that I would share my customer experience with you.

I went to your website, which despite having the ability to display English on the Canadian site, was clearly unable to show me anything other than Dutch when on the Netherlands site. Despite this problem, I managed to spend an hour or two using Google Translate to build up a list of roughly €1500 worth of stuff to fill my new home... only to find out that in 2011, not only is your website monolingual, it also doesn't actually sell anything. I was instead directed to bring a printed copy to your store in Amsterdam Zuidoost.

But I thought: "Who am I to judge the way people do things in this country? Maybe that's just how they do things here". And so, with this in mind, I emailed the list to my smartphone, left work early, and headed over to the nearest Ikea.

But after navigating the store and finding the customer service area, your resoundingly unhelpful representative there informed me that in order for me to give you my money and get what I need, I must spend another hour or so wandering through your store, hauling heavy objects off shelves and dragging them through the checkout. Apparently, having €1500 and a list of things I'd like to purchase from you handed to a customer service representative is not enough to actually do business at Ikea.

I ask you: why do you even have a website? Why do you bother with this impression of customer service when you clearly have no interest in providing any? More importantly, why don't you want my money?

It's sad really, Ikea was my natural choice as a new arrival in this country, but you've gone out of your way to make it impossible to pay for your products.

Not Invested

August 18, 2008 07:01 +0000  |  Capitalism Money 10

A financial adviser and friend of Noreen's sent me a message a couple weeks ago as a sort of follow up to previous conversations we'd had in the past. Obviously, he was looking to expand his client base and had found my name while flipping through his contact history and so I got a polite email asking if I was interested in investing with him any time soon.

Knowing that having an investment portfolio is supposed to be the smart thing, I gave it a shot. I replied that I had reservations about investing any of my money in funds where my money could be used for "evil", so if I were to do any kind of investment, I'd need fine-grained control over what money went where to ensure a clear conscience.

Like a professional, he responded with a few suggestions based on my tastes, but then he let that professionalism slip when he went on to defend Microsoft as a liberator of the impoverished. He did point out though that even the most ethical of funds he could find leaned heavily on Canada's "Big Five" banks -- institutions which would only re-lend my money to companies like Bruce Power, Shell, and Sony. This, coupled with my less-than-mainstream ideas of "good" and "evil" corporations leaves me with few options.

So I won't be joining the investment train. At least, I won't be going there until I can find a way to square it with my morals. Two things just keep repeating themselves over and over in my head, and until they're satisfied, mutual funds and the like are pretty much off limits:

  1. Capitalism rarely, if ever, does the Right thing
  2. The money we get from investments isn't free. Someone, somewhere is paying for that dividend and it just doesn't feel right to profit from it.

Trip Funds

August 07, 2007 16:14 +0000  |  Money 'Round-the-World Travel 4

My parents (most vocally my mother) worked very hard to drill one way of thinking into my brain: "Find out what you want to do and do it. Worry about the money last". It's an ideology that many might consider irresponsible, but my grandfather's words: "Money is for spending!" still echo in my head. It is after all only money, and this is a life experience.

So true to family tradition, I have left the costs of my round the world trip to the last minute. It's not that I've been financially irresponsible or anything, in fact, I have roughly $12K in the bank for this gig... I just haven't burdened myself with the numbers until now. And now I know that I don't have enough.

Ballpark costs at this point look like roughly $3700 for plane tickets and $2000 for moving. That's just the trip. If I want somewhere to live in Vancouver, I'll need an additional $1500 or so for rent & damage deposit. That leaves $4800 for room & board for 1.5 months in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Chech Republic, Switzerland and Italy, then whatever I end up spending cash on in Korea (big thanks to Shawna for putting me up while I'm in town).

I figured that that kind of cash would be fine. I do, after all, get by on $1K/month quite comfortably in Toronto. However, I pay rent and make my own food here, while I'll have to endure the costs of hostel fees and restaurants on the other side of the pond. With hostels in Germany running $60 - $90 CAD /night, that $4800 is going to run out fast.

I'm not going to change anything though. I just have to manage my expenses so the majority goes on my low-interest credit card rather than paying in cash (can you get travellers cheques with a credit card? Should I bother?) I'll pay off what I can when I get to Vancouver, saving just enough for a first month's rent payment and worry about the rest later.

When I moved to Toronto, I racked up a debt of roughly $5700 and paid it off within a year. It looks like I'll be doing something similar for this move as well, so those of you who are reading this from Vancouver, please remember that I'll be as poor as a church mouse for some time after I arrive. This is, a life experience, and what's a few thousand dollars of debt when compared to that?

In Preparation of a Torontonian Exodous

July 22, 2007 16:14 +0000  |  Blogger Geek Stuff Imager Melanie Money Moving Riptown 'Round-the-World The Toronto Public Space Committee Travel 2

I've not been posting a lot lately, mostly because I'm just stupid-busy. I'd forgotten what an incredible hassle it was to move my life 4349.9 kilometres away in the first place and doing it again is generally un-fun.

For starters, the cost of moving is ridiculous. Most moving companies will only accept a minimum of 1000lbs (they charge by weight, not time), and since I live in a bachelor, that's typically an aweful lot of extra space. On top of that, I have to pay for storage (since I'll be in Europe for a couple months before getting to Vancouver) and insurance, and movers. My latest quote was $2429.54!

Clearly, I have to keep looking, but time is running short.

Once I have a mover, I need a moving day, and since I'm not likely to leave Toronto 'till September 11th (yes, you read right, it is the cheapest day to fly), I could be living at Melanie's out of a suitcase for nearly a month.

Then there's the flight itself, I've been working with a travel agent and the routing is insane. I want to visit these places:

  • Stockholm
  • Berlin
  • Amsterdam
  • Geneva
  • Prague
  • Rome/Vatican City
  • Seoul

So one would imagine that the cheapest (and most efficient) option would be:

  • Toronto » Stockholm
  • Rome » Seoul
  • Seoul » Vancouver

But sadly, because of the way the airlines work, not only do I have to use Frankfurt as my entrance & exit for Europe, and route my Seoul trip through Singapore, but in order to get home, I have to fly back through Europe!

  • Toronto » Frankfurt
  • Frankfurt » Singapore
  • Singapore » Seoul
  • Seoul » Singapore
  • Singapore » Frankfurt
  • Frankfurt » Vancouver

This trip is about $3500. I can't be the only one that thinks this is insane. Obviously, I can get a direct Seoul » Vancouver flight, but that costs roughly $600 more and a RoundTheWorld pass is nearly $5000.

I may still take the more direct route, if only because it means I'm not in transit for 26hours on my last leg, not to mention the environmental implications of adding so many more kilometres to my trip. I'll also be buying carbon credits, but somehow, that doesn't make me feel any better about it all.

I'm also leaving my life in Toronto, of which Melanie is a big part. She's going through a rough spot in her life lately, and sometimes I feel like I'm not helping enough because of all of these other complications, not to mention the fact that I'm likely to make it worse when I leave. Even though we both knew this was coming the day we met, it doesn't make things any easier.

I have responsibilities as coordinator for the Camaras in Public Spaces campaign of the TPSC. I have yet to find a suitable replacement. We have a big event coming up for August, but someone will have to be here in October to field questions from the press when the pilot project is over and the one I had in mind to replace me doesn't appear interested. Stephen has expressed interest, but he's always got so much on his plate, I wanted to bring in some fresh blood to run the show, but I'm not sure who that would be at the moment.

Then there's my job. I don't have one lined up in Vancouver just yet, though my current boss has been kind enough to look into available positions with Riptown's Vancouver office. Whether there's a spot for me there or not, I'm not too worried about finding work in what I understand to be a competitive market, but that spectre of joblessness is still pretty scary.

Lastly, I've started re-coding my site using the new techniques I've been learning at my current job. The new site (still in development) will use a true MVC system and include nifty stuff like Ajax and JQuery as well as a Modified Preorder Tree Traversal algorithm for storing the hierarchical sorting structures in my Imager. This is mostly in preparation for when I'm in Europe and want to remote-blog and upload images -- I want the site to be better equipped.

So that's all for now. Wish me luck I suppose. If my heart & brain don't implode from the pressure, those of you reading this from Vancouver should see me in a few months.

Where's Willy?

May 10, 2007 21:38 +0000  |  Money Nifty Links 0

Playing off the success of Where's George, Where's Willy is a $5 bill tracking system you can use to find where your money has travelled. In some cases, I saw bills that left Toronto and ended up in Sarnia, while some bills have ended up in Saskatoon. It's kinda neat.

To participate, take the nearest $5 bill, go to the site and put in it's serial number (three letters followed by a string of numbers along the bottom). If the site has a record of that bill, you can see where it's been and if it doesn't it'll create an entry for it so that others can do the same.

To help the process along, you can even write whereswilly.com on the bill.