There is an event today at the PNE area here called the Taste of The City where various vendors rented a booth to allow people to sample their food or beverages in hopes to encourage them to visit their restaurants. The admission was free but you had to purchase these tickets where you could buy 10 for $5 or 20 for $10. Each sample portion or say large drink would require X amount of tickets with most of them being two from what I saw.

I couldn’t but to help notice how so many people were actually comparing the value of the food to determine what they would use their tickets on. Some of the portions were pretty small for certain vendors and they were asking for six tickets such as for this small slice of duck meat. Of course, people would be debating if it was worth it or not by comparing how each ticket was essentially worth 50 cent each and comparing that to trying to buy something similar with plain money.

Kind of defeats the purpose of the atmosphere I guess where the whole point is to worry less about money. At the same time, I guess it is like say buying Disneyworld money and spending it. I remember the last time I was there the prices for items in comparison to buying it normally outside of that place was astronomically high. I guess it’s one of those you want to have fun but at the same time don’t want to simply throw money way.

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Here in Vancouver there is a very known street area located at Hastings and Main where a lot of homeless people and illegal drug transactions often take place. I was talking to a business owner recently who knew another person that ran a business around that area.

He told me stories such as how the owner has such a hard time attracting customers as homeless people would often come into the store or hang around the entrance area which would discourage people from going near it. He even joked a bit on how whenever he went down there it appeared that there were more transactions happening on the streets of that area than any of the businesses.

I know a little further west there are similar problems and there are plans to renovate a lot of the buildings in time for the 2010 Olympics. It’s kind of interesting though as there are sides against these types of changes as they feel it is pushing poor people away even more and at the same time others say it’s good to start revitalizing the area.

I guess a big reason why people would setup a business in these types of areas initially is the cheap real estate. I can’t say that I have ever honestly seen one business by itself completely change say a whole neighborhood from a poor image to a more neutral one. It usually takes a few others as well. Although, I will be amazed if that area changes as ever since I was a child it has always been like that.

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In recent news here it appears that Walmart has finally found a location to open up a store in the Vancouver area. The company tried to open up a store here before with a lot of people objecting to it as they felt it would harm the local community such as an increase of air pollution and the possibility of small businesses being forced to close.

It was announced recently that they are going to be taking over the building of an existing Costco wholesale business at Grandview Hwy as the company is planning to relocate to a different location. The Walmart store is set to open sometime near 2009 and is suppose to create hundreds of new jobs. People can’t really argue about the location here either now as it is a busy commercial area as it is.

What is really interesting to me is that just a few blocks away from this location is a supermarket called The Real Canadian Superstore that has been there for ages and is where I normally shop a lot. I’m one of those people who have read the stories on how Walmarts in the US have been able to put companies like these out of business as everyone wants everything cheaper. As a result, it almost becomes as if Walmart is the economy afterwards as people work and purchase goods from it with no one else to really go to.

I’m personally one of the more open minded people in this situation though. I can definitely see how this could have a negative impact as while I’m sure it will enable a lot of people to buy goods for cheaper, in the long run a company with that much control can pretty much dictate things such as wage standards or making it very difficult for local suppliers to compete with others who use cheaper labor.

At the same time, I can’t deny that this has got to be one of the most prolific examples of capitalism as they pretty much earned their success from ground up. If you think about it, they are only really giving what the majority of people want as in the end the consumers control who comes out at the top.

Honestly though, they do have Walmart stores in other cities here within the province and price wise it seems to be on par with a lot of other businesses. Should be interesting to see how this develops.

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I attended the Learning Annex event with an open mind and as you all know one of my main goals was to document my experience. It was held at the Vancouver and exhibition convention centre and to my knowledge there were about 4000 to 5000 attendees. Of course, I’m sure most people attended with the assumption that they would get to see Donald Trump live as well as getting a free copy of his book “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life”.

They sent a mass e-mail to all the registrants beforehand on how the first fifty people in line would get $100. Apparently the first person there was lining up as early as 2:30am. That alone kind of gave me a picture beforehand on what the overall event would be like.

The live speakers there consisted of Bob Kittell, Dr. Albert Lowry, Don Burnham, Lee Brower, Raymond Aaron and Chris Johnson. The topics ranged from making money with stocks, real estate, utilizing government grants and general motivational speeches. With the exception of Lee Brower’s keynote, for the most part the other sessions felt like an incredibly long infomercial using typical techniques to get people to buy tools and seminar packages on the spot.

Here is an example with the first session which was pitching a seminar for a product called Investools that is suppose to help people in deciding when to sell or buy stocks. At first the speaker teaches people about some very basic information about the industry in general which of course is very enlightening if you don’t already have too much knowledge of it. They then proceed to inform how lucrative it can be to get involved while showing all these testimonials from people who have been successful with it.

With that planted in people’s mind, they then show you how expensive the program would normally be apparently while using a return on investment way of thinking to further justify the price. Afterwards, they tell you how they are offering this exclusive promotion for that day only where they have decided to give it at a special discounted price and that there are limited quantities. With Investools for example, it went from $4,297 to $999 (Which was a pretty consistent final price range for most of the other products).

This would cause a frenzy of people to get up from their seats to purchase the product right away for a fear of loss. It then felt like an auction house of some sort as the person would ask people to bring out their credit cards while continuously counting down how many have been sold. I captured a quick video of it here:

There was one technique that was used by a lot of the speakers which I thought was a bit devious personally. A lot of times the speaker would use the promise of giving people something expensive or luxurious for free on the spot to play with the crowd’s emotion to get them to chant and cheer. Then at the very end they casually slip in on how you have to buy their product to qualify in getting it for free. A great example was with Raymond Aaron’s session as he made a lot of people believe that he was going to give everyone in the room a free cruise ship vacation if people show enough enthusiasm. Here is a sample of that:

Aside from the speakers, most of the other happenings revolved around giving away money and prizes such as raffles and holding a quick dance contest. There were some activities that involved people having to network and meet others. I personally thought it would have been better if there were more events like that. I did get to meet some new contacts which was nice. People were getting weary overall it seemed with the conference and the event organizers would constantly mention how Donald Trump will be there.

At around 7pm or so one of the event organizer mentions how it was time for everyone to welcome Donald Trump. The lady was presenting it as if he was going to walk in the room. A lot of people were simply looking around the room and then to a lot of people’s surprise it was simply a recording from one of his past appearances at an Annex event in New York. There were a lot of moans and sarcasm from the crowd over it initially and it almost felt like the lady was shocked over the reaction. Lucky there was no anarchy of any sort. A lot of people simply left in disappointment without even watching the recorded speech.

For the Trump speech in general, myself and a lot of others thought it was kind of humorous when you could clearly see that the video was shortened from the original length it seemed as there would often be these noticeable video transition effects. Here is some of the video for those who are interested:

In the end, I did get a free copy of the book as advertised. It was disappointing overall I thought personally and I really didn’t like how some of the speakers seemed to try to belittle the status of the attendees as a way to imply that buying their products will help change all that. Some example are how there was a generalization at times that all the people in the room had horrible credit scores and that they could help them fix that or that everyone in there were poor financially with a disappointing lifestyle. I don’t know about everyone else, but I would have preferred if it was more of a positive approach in wanting to genuinely help others. I did get to meet friendly and successful people too and so all was not lost.

I thought the best session was Lee Brower’s keynote as he seemed genuine in wanting to help/inspire people without a hidden agenda to sell a product of some sort. There was a funny blooper at the end as he wanted to give away this package of Pringles to the crowd and the lid flipped opened.

If there was an actual fee to attend the event though I could easily see how a lot of people would have been outraged over it. I think most people were disappointed overall based on the comments I heard. I personally walked away with what I intended to do which was to attend mainly for experience.

In my opinion, I think the important thing to realize before attending these types of events is that if you want to change something in your life it always starts with you changing yourself first. That way you’ll prevent yourself from buying all these things emotionally in hopes that it will be a quick fix answer in life whether it’d be personally or financially.

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So today I attended that Learning Annex event and it lasted for quite awhile. One of my goal was to document my experience so that everyone else can see what these events are like along with some interesting observations that I had of the event. I did get to meet some new people too which was fun. On the flip side, There definitely was a wave of money making course for purchase. More on that later.

It ended up snowing here when the conference was over too. I’ll come up with a breakdown tomorrow for everyone to read and I may even spread out the posts a bit as some topics I felt could warrant a seperate post.

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