Entrepreneurial Winnipeg

After smoking in public places was banned in 2004, happy hour crowds dwindled in bars across the province.

In a bid to woo customers back to his lounge, Ron Petryna, the owner of the Headingley Hotel, began running conventional Friday night bingo games.

"We started off giving away pretty tame stuff -- cases of pop or boxes of candy," Petryna says. Then he recalled a Ladies' Night promotion he'd witnessed south of the border -- one that climaxed with a few rounds of "naughty bingo" where female participants went home with vibrators and such.

"So we began to introduce adult toys into our own bingo games," says Petryna. "Next we added special martinis and cocktails named after the games. This all evolved from there."

"This all" refers to the fact that Manitoba has quietly become the undisputed erotic bingo capital of the world. Sure, you can find comparable goings-on in places like Toronto, Ont., Portland, Ore. and Orlando, Fla. But "dirty bingo" or "X-rated bingo" or however it's billed in those burgs isn't a standard occurrence. Not like it is at Dick's Dylan's, the Stock Exchange Hotel and the Riverside Inn, to name a few local nightspots that now host erotic bingo on a weekly basis.

This didn't exist when I lived in Winnipeg. In those days, Bingo was the exclusive domain of the bored elderly and others with ridiculously low opportunity costs of time. Whoever first recognized the potential market for the combination of Bingo and titillation should get the Kirzner award for the year. Entrepreneurial alertness extraordinaire.

HT: @CJSnowdon

An odd kind of insurance

Sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference between insurance and lotto.

Recall that the general point of insurance is to equalize utility across world-states. So you forgo some utility in the good state of the world by spending money on insurance so that you get some bonus utility in a bad state of the world. Yeah, yeah, this requires that the marginal utility of money not get out of whack across the two world-states; if you don't get many jollies from money in the bad state of the world, this doesn't work. But let's hold that constant for this case.

A Manitoba pool and hot-tub company took out a weather insurance policy such that if temperatures hit more than 34.5 degrees Celsius on 18 July, they'd get a big payout. They then told customers that if the temperature hit 34.5 degrees, they'd get a full refund on any pool, hot tub, or water heater they bought between 1 March and 4 July this year.

In March, the owners of North West Wholesale -- a pool and hot-tub company -- took an insurance policy on the weather. This means, if temperatures reach more than 34.5 C at the Richardson International Airport today, people who bought either a pool, hot tub or water heater from the company between March 1 and July 4 will be eligible for a full rebate.


People may have scoffed at the store owners back in March on the gamble they took, but some 80 customers may be laughing their way to the bank, as Environment Canada is predicting a 35 C high for this afternoon.
...

But chances may have been better for Tuesday's weather, as Environment Canada predicts temperatures could be much higher in Winnipeg and southern Manitoba.

The projected high is 37 C, which will most likely prompt the weather agency to issue a humidex advisory, said Environment Canada meteorologist Eric Dykes. 

(HT: Mom)

Today's temperature at the airport reached 33 degrees (link valid 18 July but probably just gives current day's temperatures thereafter), so the insurance event wasn't triggered.

But if I were sinking a pile of money in a pool, I'd want the refund if the weather turned out too cold to use the darn thing rather than in the state of the world in which I'm very happy with my purchase. And so it seems more like lotto than insurance for the customers.

Seriously... daytime highs of -20 in winter (night-time lows of -40); +33 in summer. Winnipeg's only really liveable for five weeks around May-June and another five weeks mid-September through mid-October. The other 42, unliveable. And then there are the mosquitoes. On the upside, I don't think they've ever had an earthquake. Floods, often. Tornadoes, rarely. But never an earthquake.

Theory of Winnipeg

Winnipeg approaches the Tim's Event Horizon. The Brewpocalypse looms.

When last I lived in Winnipeg, Tim's wasn't a bad place to get decent brewed coffee and rather good doughnuts.

Now, there seems to be one on every block, each with a queue through the drive-through 15 cars long.

And the coffee seems much worse. I don't think it's just long exposure to NZ coffee. The brewed coffee at Tim's just seems much weaker than before.

I have a theory.

There's only so much caffeine and coffee goodness allocated to the Tim's in Winnipeg. Each new Tim's means there's less caffeine in each cup. So drivers have to go to shorter intervals between fixes. Which leads to more Tim's. And a downward spiral.

Heed the warning of Frogstar World B. Before long, naught will be left but Tim's, with cars flitting from one to the next in a desperate quest for caffeine before their drivers give up and evolve into birds.