What you missed at the Proms

This weekend the Maple Leaf Brass Band performed in two Last Night at the Proms concerts: Saturday in Perth, Sunday in Ottawa.

Unfortunately for the folks in Perth, the Sunday performance was a bigger and more action-packed evening. For example, it featured the British High Commissioner singing a delightful rendition of Burlington Bertie from Bow.

As charming as his excellency is, the ladies still seem to have more appreciation for Garth Hampson's powerful tenor voice. While the audiences in both Perth and Ottawa had the opportunity to hear Garth sing, it was only one lady who had the chance to sing the first verse to Ode to Newfoundland with him after Sunday's performance. [I believe she would have been up for singing all 4 verses, but it had been a long evening for Garth.]

[The Ottawa audience also got to hear the Harmonia Choir who made my eyes all watery with their beautiful renditions of the Ash Grove and All Through the Night.]

Pickle on the 401

If you're on the 401, west of Kingston, heading to Toronto, and you're hankering for a slice of dill pickle, no problem! Just pull off into the newly renovated rest stop and you can buy one nicely wrapped in plastic for only 99 cents (plus HST).

Deceptive Price Tags

Over in Estonia, Tanel Mehine at the University of Tartu has discovered that "consumers perceive yellow price tags as presenters of discounts" and suggests that "companies have the opportunity to increase the consumer’s reference price and thereby to raise revenues by changing the colour of the price tag without offering an actual discount."

In his study, he only compared the use of white and yellow labels.

I hope in his next study he looks at the impact of red labels that say "price checked weekly" like they use at Loblaws.

Here are two I found this past weekend next to cat food price tags of $0.79 and $0.85. The weekend before, those tins were priced at $0.75 and a few weeks ago they were on sale at $0.55 each.

From these examples and others, I've come to the conclusion that "price checked weekly" means that Loblaws has checked a price and decided they needed to increase it.