More from Loblaws

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Shortly after posting Tuesday’s mini-rant about Loblaws PC Organics yogourt, I received a second reply from Loblaws customer service:

Dear Mr. Dodge,

Thank you for taking the time to pass on your comments regarding our PC Organics Strawberry Fruit Bottom Yogurt.  We apologize for the delay in our response as we’re experiencing higher than normal volume of emails.

I was disappointed to hear that this product did not meet your expectations. Our product development team re-evaluates products on an ongoing basis and customer feedback such as yours is very valuable to them during that process. Accordingly, I have communicated your comments to them for consideration during their next review of this product.

Mr. Dodge, we appreciate hearing from you.  Please continue to let us know how we’re doing, as your feedback is one of the best ways for us to improve.

There’s still not much to go on here, but at least now I know that my complaint didn’t fall into a generic “website feedback” black hole never to be seen again. I know I left my complaint during the holidays, but two weeks for a response is pretty sad. It’s the Internet equivalent of keeping me on hold for two hours while telling me over and over again how important my call is.

I’m also struck by the timing of the reply: after waiting for two weeks for a proper acknowledgement of my feedback, this more appropriate response arrived barely two hours after I posted yesterday’s article. While that could be coincidence, it seems just a touch too convenient.

More fake milk and bad customer service

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Milk ingredients invade my favourite yogourt

Just before Christmas and not even a week after writing about fake milk products, I bought a tub of my regular yogourt, President’s Choice Organic strawberry fruit-bottom yogourt, to be met with a nasty surprise when I opened it up at home a few days later: a new recipe and a substantial downgrade in quality. The taste and texture were all wrong and it left a chemical aftertaste that lingered until I brushed my teeth to get rid of it. I didn’t have to look far to see the culprit: “organic milk ingredients” at the top of the new ingredient list versus the “ultrafiltered partly skimmed organic milk” that headed up the old formula. Foiled again!

Thoroughly disgusted with both the new product and the fact that I hadn’t thought to verify the ingredients on the new container before I bought it, I submitted this feedback on the President’s Choice website on December 28:

I’ve been enjoying PC Organics Strawberry Fruit Bottom Yogourt for a number of years but have been disappointed with the new formulation that has recently replaced the older flavour. To be charitable, it tastes awful. It also leaves an equally unpleasant aftertaste, has a lumpy texture reminiscent of cottage cheese, and features a fruit bottom that neither looks nor tastes real. In short, it’s a considerable step down from the PC Organics yogourt that I was buying just three months ago.

I was not surprised when I checked the ingredient list on the new tub and saw that the first ingredient is now “organic milk ingredients” rather than the “ultrafiltered partly skimmed organic milk” that headed up the much better previous version of this product. If you think that consumers don’t notice the difference, you’re sadly mistaken. You are also sadly mistaken if you believe that the change in serving size will mask the increase in carbs and decrease in fibre in the new formula.

I’m disappointed that President’s Choice is sourcing cheaper ingredients and not directly informing consumers that the formula has changed in this way. I will not be buying PC yogourt again, and will be examining more closely the labels of any other PC products that I buy in the future.

I checked the “response required” box and sent it off. I got this response early in the new year, posted in its entirety (minus the French translation):

Thank you for visiting our website.

Our Customer Service hours are Monday to Friday 8:30 am to 5:30pm EST.

Please note that Customer Service will be closed on Monday December 26th.

This email message is confidential, may be legally privileged and is intended for the exclusive use of the addressee. If you received this message in error or are not the intended recipient, you should destroy the email message and any attachments or copies, and you are prohibited from retaining, distributing, disclosing or using any information contained. Please inform us of the delivery error by return email. Thank you for your cooperation.

So a customer who spent more than half of his total food expenses in 2011 at Loblaws expresses his dissatisfaction and all he gets in return is “thank you for visiting our website” and “we will be closed for one day, a week and a half ago”? Well, I still have another tub of this crap sitting in the fridge; maybe I’ll return it to the store this week.  I’m certainly not going to eat it.

[January 11 update: I got a second response from Loblaws shortly after posting this article.]

Single-lens challenge

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I set myself a challenge when Risa and I took a walk through the wildflower preserve at Todmorden Mills this weekend: to use a single fixed focal-length lens (16mm fisheye in this case) for the entire outing. Something about it seems old-fashioned: in an age when super zoom lenses can be found on virtually every camera, you might as well be wearing pants up to your armpits, wagging your finger and starting every sentence with, “Back in my day…” Still, it’s a good exercise to learn to zoom with your feet again. It gives both you and your pictures perspective.

This being January in Toronto, there just aren’t a lot of wildflowers around. There’s also not much more than a smattering of snow and ice here and there, making everything at ground level relentlessly brown. Even so, the preserve was fairly busy when we went, with a number of families and dog walkers enjoying the short trail, sunny skies, and relatively balmy weather. We were each armed with a camera but seemed to be the only ones taking pictures.

Check out the short gallery below the fold.

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Dodgeville, now bigger and better

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New and old Dodgevilles

Those of you who read Dodgeville directly rather than in an RSS reader may have noticed that the site looks a little different today.  It’s now running a theme based on Panorama with a few minor tweaks. The most noticeable change is that images and galleries in new posts will be larger than they have been to this point. When this incarnation of Dodgeville launched almost five years ago, images were limited to being a mere 500 pixels wide. That was updated within a year to 640 pixels, and is now being upsized again to 800 pixels. Images in galleries may be larger yet, up to 1024 pixels wide. The changes will allow room for more detail in images. The new theme is cleaner overall and it should hold for another couple of years.

Other changes include several new banner images at the top of each page and some backend modifications that won’t mean much to most of you. When I first put together this site, I wrote that no one ever asks me questions, but I’d post a FAQ as soon as people started to inquire regularly. Well, I now have enough genuine FAQs that a FAQ in order. You should see it under the “About” menu above in a couple of days.

I’ll be making several additional updates to the site over the next few days, so let me know if you notice anything amiss.

Feather ice

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Feather ice detail

Seeing a large ice crystal like this, about an inch long, is fairly rare. Now imagine seeing thousands upon thousands of them:

Feather ice field on Rice Lake

We’re spending a few post-Christmas days at the cottage and awoke to a visual treat on Thursday: Wednesday’s sudden deep freeze and blowing wind gave us a large field of feather ice growing on the lake. The lake began the day on Monday as completely open water; Tuesday brought some long ribbons of ice along the wind lines; by Wednesday only a few open spots were left, and by Thursday morning it was completely frozen over. I don’t know much about the formation of feather ice, but I’m guessing that the low temperatures combined with the wind blowing over the remaining patches of open water on Wednesday picked up enough moisture to cause this field to form near our shoreline. It’s at least a hectare in size.

I would have spent much more time taking pictures, but lying down on a frozen lake while manipulating  an SLR on a tripod at ground level isn’t exactly the most comfortable position I’ve ever been in. Check out the gallery below the fold for a couple of additional pictures I managed to take before my pants froze to the lake.

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Still raking in the dough

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Mackenzie King's grave is gathering money again

I wrote about the comings and goings of money on Mackenzie King’s grave last month. When the cash disappeared again in October, I figured that the mystery of the pennies was over: in the five months that I’d been keeping an eye on the waxing and waning of Mackenzie King’s fortune, the empty ledger stone stayed that way unless I anted up a few cents to get the penny collection started again. And since I’m no longer a daily passer-by, my ability to assist and document the phenomenon has suffered. But I was alerted last week that something may be up when someone arrived at Dodgeville after Googling “why pennies on mackenzie king’s grave.” Sure enough, when I rode by this week, Mackenzie King’s ledger was as overflowing with money as it ever has been. Apparently, someone’s been seeding the account in my absence.

It also made me wonder about what started this cash bonanza in the first place. As I’d written in my previous post, I have no idea who placed the original eight pennies in June that started Mackenzie King’s cash collection this year. At least one person noted a single penny on the ledger as early as August 2009, but that certainly didn’t blossom into the same kind of ongoing investment that I’ve seen this year. Placing money on Mackenzie King’s grave may be an old tradition, but it’s one that’s been taken up by many more people this year than in the past.

Danforth Avenue in Whoville

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One of the popular trends in Christmas decorations this year seems to be the Whoville-inspired Christmas tree with a comparatively giant ornament hanging off the top and pulling it over toward the ground. I don’t pretend to understand why these have made the leap from illustrations in a  book to real life but I freely admit that they’re cute/odd enough to make passable small table decorations:

Miniature Whoville trees inside

However, The Danforth BIA has driven the trend firmly into the absurd, with trees and planters standing 7 feet tall lining the street this month:

Whoville Tree on the Danforth

I’ll chalk this up to an idea that looked better on paper but failed somewhat in execution. The Grinch has already paid a stealthy visit to remove ornaments from some of the trees.

Supermarket finds: Fake milk

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Fake food, get your fake food here

Chocolate dairy beverage? Grated dairy product? Frozen dessert? Isn’t anything made with milk, cheese, or cream any more? I hate to sound like a grouchy old man (though I’m rapidly becoming one), but when I was a kid, these things were called chocolate milk, grated cheese, and ice cream. Instead, more and more items in the dairy case have “modified milk ingredients” at the top of the ingredients list. It makes me wonder where all of the real dairy products go.

Of course, these products are not exactly new, having been around in one form or another for a few years. They are clearly part of the accelerating trend in the grocery store to pass off fake food as the real thing.

I didn’t buy either the dairy beverage or the frozen dessert, so I can’t review their taste. But I didn’t notice that the “grated dairy product” wasn’t actual cheese until I got home, so I can review that: it was so salty that it was inedible. Other than the texture, a dash of Silani grated dairy product on some pasta was basically indistinguishable from emptying a box of salt onto the plate. Even the Loblaws No Name Parmesan is superior.

While most “food” manufacturers take pains to hide the fact that they’re hiding the facts from you, Beatrice was notable for positively trumpeting the non-milkiness of their dairy beverage:

Beatrice Chocolate Dairy Beverage

The text in the red circle says that it’s made with real milk “and added dairy ingredients.” It sounds about as appetizing as eating a burger made from beef and added cow ingredients. Beatrice may have learned its lesson after a few years of trying to sell this stuff and returned to selling chocolate milk again earlier this year.

Future mayoral material

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The Star has been running a series of articles about the sights and history along the 501 streetcar route.  Today’s installment is an online quiz that asks readers to identify intersections along the route based on clues about nearby buildings or infrastructure. I scored seven out of ten (once again, my relative lack of detailed knowledge of the west end does me in), which makes me a Torontophile on the Star‘s grading scale, just one grade below master Google cheat. But the best thing about the scale is the wonderful snark reserved for those who get just one or two answers correct:

Future Mayor, slightly better than Vancouverite

I guess that having actually ridden the 501 means that I’m just not mayoral material. I’d agree with that sentiment judging by the current administration at City Hall, but I sincerely hope that we’ll have learned our lesson by the next election.