The Ben Mulroney Show - The buy, wear and return loophole for shoppers could be over for good

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Why our Healthcare system can't cover everyone, with Guest: Dr. Nadia Alam, Family Doctor and Past-President of The Ontario Medical Association  -The buy, wear, return days for shoppers could be over with Guest: Mariya Postelnyak, Consumer Affairs Reporter for the Globe and Mail -Ben’s Charcuterie Board of Stories If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey Spotify, this is Javi. My biggest passion is music, and it's not just sounds and instruments. It's more than that to me. It's a world full of harmonies with chillers. From streaming to shopping, it's on Prime. Welcome back to the show. The Ben Mulroney Show marches on on the Chorus Radio Network. This next story should disappoint, but probably not surprise too many of us. Despite nine procedures, an Ontario man is speaking out after being operated on nine different times in nine different in Ontario hospitals, and they did not resolve his health problem.

So he opted to travel to the United States last year and pay 600 grand for a tenth and hopefully final operation. He was given three months to live. He's 78 years old. He had a history of Crohn's disease and they just couldn't fix him here. So he decided to take his money and go to the health care system that he thought could help him the best. And that's the United States. Now we've read a few stories in the last month of patients needing to get medical care down south. We love to tout our health care system as something that the world should marvel at. How come we see these stories so, so frequently? In fact, Alex Pearson had a listener call in with his own similar story and his only option for his wife is an expensive

surgery that is not covered here. The idea has come up of keeping my life for insurance money so she can afford to have this surgery because my son relies on her. If I'd rather her have a good life with him than live like she is right now, that's how bad it is. No, we live in a G7 nation where we have universal care and we are told it's the best system in the world and we are also told that we don't have other choices and so that to me is unforgivable that anyone has to live like this. That is heartbreaking, that is heartbreaking, that was on Alex Pearson's show on 640 Toronto. Joining me now to discuss this, the state of play, where we are and where we can go as well as a few other stories, Dr. Nathie Allam, family doctor and past president of the Ontario Medical Association.

Doctor, you have devoted your life to the healthcare system. So when you hear stories like this- I have, it is my career. Yeah, so when you hear these stories, what do you think? I think it's the same story again and again. We saw this back before the pandemic where number of patients were going down to the US. And in fact, provinces were sending going down to the US and in fact provinces were

sending patients down to the US to have surgeries that were available here but where we didn't have the capacity to do them. So this is not a new story. The gentleman who had to go down south because he had issues with his surgeries, that's a bit new. Usually, we can manage like when we do surgery, it works well. But sometimes the US, they tend to embrace innovation faster. And some of that innovation is good. Some of that innovation does not work out in this gentleman's case. My hope that innovation does not work out. In this gentleman's in case, my hope is that it will work out. But to get back to the big issue, our health care system

is not the number one system in the world. The only thing it's number one on is that people can get access to care regardless of finances, right? Especially emergency care. But that's, doctor, that is, that's the sticking point these days is, what does access mean? Because it doesn't mean what it used to. And what is the level of care mean? Because in a lot of cases, it doesn't mean what it used to. Exactly, exactly.

Cause access, you're right. It might mean that you can see somebody in the emergency department. You can see somebody, if it's a true emergency, relatively quickly. if it's not an emergency but it's urgent, it can take hours. And the same is true now for family doctors. Despite the recruiting, despite the changes, we still have a huge shortage of family doctors. Well, look, what the CMA said, we've actually got a shortage of thousands of family doctors. The same is true for specialists. And that's what we're seeing.

Two million Ontarians don't have access to a family doctor. 1.2 million British Colombians are currently waiting to see a specialist, that's according to a survey of 282 patients. They were in so was a specialist average waitlist has 282 patients with the first consultation happening at four weeks for urgent cases, 10 weeks for semi-urgent cases, and up to 10 months for non-urgent cases. So this is not localized in one place,

this is across the country. And so, I mean, the bargain used to be, yes, the Americans innovate and at the highest levels, they have the best facilities and the best doctors. But in Canada, we're 85% of the way there for 100% of the people. That's, I mean, I'm making those numbers up, but that's what we took pride in.

And now it feels like the floor has dropped out and the ceiling has gotten lower. Yep, yep. And the truth's beginning to come out of what the reality of our system is for patients. I think part of the issue,, I've spoken to specialists before, when these wait times started coming out, so many of them are afraid of who's waiting on the wait list because they are reliant on what the family doctor sends them, the information that's there. And they're reliant

on the fact that things don't change. But that's not actually true for patients. Things do change. So a person who is not urgent before can become urgent. And they may not reveal that to their family doctor because they may just accept the wait. Canadians are very good at waiting. We wait for everybody. We are very good at waiting. Yeah we have way too much inborn trust for our institutions. Yes and we do need to push them. We do need to challenge them, particularly when those who can make decisions around pay, around hiring numbers, around recruitment, when they say we've got a world-class system, we actually have to push back and say, no, that's not true.

And it hasn't been true for years. We need to do more. We need to be sensible and responsible. Yes, we need to be fair, but we also need to pay attention to these wait times. They are unfair and honestly they're ridiculous. Yeah, well what do we do? Let's cast our eyes to Canada's north where the president of the Yukon Medical Association says he's noticed a concerning trend lately with some physicians closing up or moving out of the territory, and those areas are unable to find a new physician. Now, last week we spoke with a veterinarian, Dr. Cliff Redford, or rather that was earlier this week, and he spent weeks volunteering in Nunavut,

clearing out major backlogs of animal surgeries. They've had no full time vets for years and we thought maybe it was a salary thing. So where for someone to work in a smaller community, they would need to be incentivized to do so. And after reading this story about the Yukon, or about Yukon, rather, I think it might, it might not just be that it might be lack of infrastructure. Yeah, I think it is. And when you ask family doctors, when you ask specialists,

why do they burn out? They mentioned administrative burden. They mentioned the lack of resources around them to support good quality care. So you end up providing care that you know isn't the best care that you know that you should, you should provide,'t. Yeah. Right and that's not okay that starts weighing on you after a while and so you do end up burning out it's called moral injury we see this in other professions we see this among the military but we also see this in medicine now unfortunately because again you want to give your patients the best care and you just don't have the resources at hand to do so. And everyone should be able to appreciate that whether they're in the medical community

or not. When I was in TV, it got increasingly frustrating that we were asked to do more with less. And I was feeling like I couldn't do my job as well as I could because I didn't have sort of the supports, the systems to support me, the technology to support me, the budgets to help us get the guest or travel to go find the guests. And after a while it's like, why am I doing this? And that's not, so it's not specific to one industry. If you don't have the infrastructure to support your, what you know you need to do the best job you can, you're gonna ask yourself, should I be

doing this job? Yeah, especially because you can. You're gonna ask yourself, should I be doing this job? Yeah, especially because you know that you're either not providing good quality information. In medicine, it's about not providing good enough quality care and so not being able to avoid avoidable illnesses. You're not able to keep patients from getting sicker and sicker, and you can't keep patients from dying then. And that eats away at you, right? It's brutal. Well, Dr. Nadia, I hope that one of these days we can have you back on the show

and we can start talking about turning the page on everything that's wrong and start building towards a future where the healthcare system can once again be something we take great pride in. So Dr. Nadia Allam, family doctor and past president of the Ontario Medical Association, I bid you adieu. Thank you so much. Take care.

Thank you. These are conversations we have to have. If we care about the healthcare system as much as we say we do, then every solution should be on the table for discussion. Nothing should be off limits. And anybody who suggests that we can't have an honest conversation about everything doesn't actually care about delivering great medicine for Canadians. Calling all sellers, Salesforce is hiring account executives to join us on the cutting edge of technology. Here, innovation isn't a buzzword. It's a way of life. You'll be solving customer challenges faster with agents, winning with purpose and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent first future together. Head to salesforce.com slash careers to learn more.

So we all try to make our dollars stretch farther these days. We all want, we have fewer dollars and we need to make them go farther. And when you put that into the world of shopping online, retail, and you end up with a new trend called, well, it's written wardrobeing, but it's written wardrobing. And it's the idea that you buy something, you wear it once, and then you return it. And that's been around for as long as people have been buying at stores and returning things.

But like I said, in a time of financial pinch, the numbers of people who do it has been spiking. And so Maria Postoliniak from the Globe and Mail Consumer Affairs Reporter has written on the growing trend of people buying, wearing, and returning, and the technology being used to stop this dead in its tracks. Maria, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Ben. So this is a growing problem for retailers, isn't it? Yeah. So according to this one study that we looked at from Aptoro, it's a logistics company,

69% of shoppers admitted to wardrobeing in 2024 and 64% admitted to doing so at least once a month. So that's pretty staggering, if you can imagine. Yeah, I'm sure it used to be a small problem that somebody would buy something. And if for a special occasion, they wanted a dress, but they just couldn't afford it. So they would wear it, they would be very delicate with it. And if they had shoes, they might put tape on the bottom of the shoes. I mean, I saw all those things in movies back in the day. It's far more intense than that far more intensive. And it's I'm sure leading to losses for these retailers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, according to the National Retail Federation in the US, the volume of returns I think increased from 613 billion in 2022 to 743 billion in 2023. And there's also of course, the environmental

impact of all these returns. But yeah, it's a huge problem. I mean, I have to assume a big chunk of it has to do with wannabe social media influencers who want to project that they have a far more far greater wardrobe than they actually have. far greater wardrobe than they actually have. Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I guess discussions around wardrobeing live very much online in a lot of anonymous forums, obviously where people can kind of confess to these things. And we looked at some Reddit threads

where people talked about this and they were pretty, yeah, they were pretty, I guess, unabashed in discussing their wardrobeing habits and they kind of blame these big corporations because they're making these huge profits and people are facing hard economic times and then there's also, yeah, the influencers who are kind of responding to social media wanting to see people wear new items, new clothes all the time and And, and this is just kind of, they're seeing it as a product of our current moment of our society right now.

So Maria, what then has been the solution that these retailers have brought to bear on this growing problem? Yeah, so, so the bigger, the more sophisticated retailers with more funds, more resources, they're able to kind of segment the shoppers and crack down on specific bad actors. They're able to kind of collect data and say, okay, a shopper who paid with this credit card or a shopper under this account, the items that they've returned have shown signs of being wardrobe.

So there's specific kind of things they look for. They look for deodorant stains, they look for smells, they look for all these kinds of criteria and they put it into the software called two boxes. And then they're able to kind of see what shoppers kind of match this criteria when they're making returns time and time again, and then they're able to zero in on them. But other other retailers who maybe can't do that, they're going to start to crack down on all shoppers, you know, by making prices higher by shortening return windows, by just making it much more difficult to earn things.

Or forcing them to leave a deposit on the clothing. We take it away if we see signs that it's been worn. Has there ever been any discussion, like there's a no-fly list if you don't trust someone to get on a plane? Is there a no-shop list? Are there people who do this with such impunity that they are just told by certain retailers, we can't trust you anymore, you're wasting our time and you're certainly not giving us any money. Yeah that was an interesting point that we learned during the research. A Sweden-based retailer, I think it's called Boost AB, they blocked 42,000 customers from buying on their website for returning too many of their purchases. And a few of the experts we spoke with said that it's possible more

retailers will start doing things like that. Well, and you know, if a lot of shoppers use that justification, and I don't think it's an excuse or a reason, because it's a justification, oh, I don't have enough money and these guys are making enough that they can afford it. If enough people do that, then it's going to force the hands of these retailers to take some pretty bold steps and make some bold changes that shoppers won't like. And what I found to be typical is if one retailer takes that first step and it yields positive results for their bottom line, then all the other ones are going to follow suit. And these next thing you know, the shoppers who used to get away with it are going to be living in a far different reality.

Exactly. And we've already seen that retailers like H&M, Zara, some of these big brands that everyone's familiar with, they're starting to shrink their return windows or charge shipping and return fees. And this might just be the path for many more retailers down the line. I was really fascinated to learn about the technology that they use. Can you drill down into that? What was it called? Two boxes? Yeah, yeah, it's called two boxes. So, what they do is, in the logistics, I guess,

warehouse where people are unpacking these parcels, these returns, they're looking at the clothes and they're able to kind of assess certain signs of retail fraud or wardrobe things specifically in this case. So as I mentioned, um, the deodorant stains of the, the, the tag being skewed a little bit in a certain way that makes it look like it's been reattached and they're able to kind of put that criteria into, uh, into their system and then connect that with an individual shopper profile. And then that way they're able to kind of maybe treat them a little bit differently and then connect that with an individual shopper profile.

And then that way they're able to kind of maybe treat them a little bit differently next time they're in the store, or at least have that data ready when they feel like they need to use it, when they're losing a lot. Now in doing your research, what are some of the policies that these retailers have? Like if they get a return

and it does show a very tiny amount of wear and tear, it's not even wear and tear, it just looks like somebody wore it, do they have a process by which they can clean it and sell it as new again, or is that off the table? Well, I would say that a lot of these logistics companies, so GoBolt, Return Bear, I would say that a lot of these logistics companies, so GoBalt, Return Bear, their whole, I guess, mission is to help retailers to be able to return

as many of the items back into the store, or at least a big part of their goal. But the problem is that it can be very hard. So a lot of these items do end up Being thrown out and they do end up in in in landfills We know that in 2022 nine point five billion pounds of returns in the u.s. Ended up in landfills That's according to up to our data and yes, so some of the more sophisticated retailers They may they may have the capacity to you know, send some of the more sophisticated retailers, they may have the capacity to send

some of the items to resellers, to charities, but we know that a lot of it gets thrown out. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us, Maria Postelniak, Consumer Affairs reporter for The Globe and Mail. It's a really, really interesting reality that's going to set in on a lot of these shoppers who've been taking advantage of these loopholes for years. And thank you so much for being here. Absolutely, thanks for having me, Ben. I tell you, one thing I don't do anymore

is I buying clothing off of Instagram. I saw a pair of jeans once during the pandemic and I thought, these will look good on me. When they arrive, I could only describe, the only way I could describe them as is wide leg gaucho pants. And no bueno for Benny Boy. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. And someone suggested once that the reason charcuterie boards

are so popular today amongst a certain generation is because that generation grew up on Lunchables. And whatever the reason of the explosion in popularity of charcuterie boards, sometimes you just want to bite. Right. Sometimes you want to bite at one something and you want a different bite at something else and they offer options. You can move laterally and still, and still nosh, if you will. And so our next segment is the radio version of that. Ben's Charcuterie Board of Stories.

Just a little taste here and there. And we got to start in Washington because there is very little political theater that is more entertaining than Senate confirmation hearings and and and so many of Donald Trump's appointees and picks and nominees are lightning rods for controversy, so you know that these nomination hearings are going to be television gold and audio gold. And in the theater that I'm referring to, there are two types of characters besides the nominee. There is, well for example, there

is the person who's completely on board, who the snowplow character just wants to make way, make it as easy as possible for the nominee. And why don't we listen to one of those snowplow characters offering up a softball, if you will, to RFK Jr., who is the nominee to head Health and Human Services. Are you a conspiracy theorist? That is a pejorative, Senator, that's applied to me, mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interest. I was told that I was a conspiracy theorist. That label was applied to me because I said that the vaccines, the COVID vaccine, didn't prevent transmission and it wouldn't prevent infection.

When the government was telling people, Americans, that it would, I was saying that because I was looking at the monkey studies in May of 2020. I was called a conspiracy, and now everybody admits it. I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said red dye caused cancer and now FDA has acknowledged that and banned it. I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ.

Last week JAMA published a meta review of 87 studies saying that there's a direct inverse correlation between IQ loss. Yeah, so there he goes. Is Mr. Kennedy, you're amazing. Here's a minute. You can tell us how amazing you are. That's one character.

Then on the other side of the aisle, you have the senator who is banging their fist and screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to present as the toughest opponent that this person will ever have, testing them in the fiery pits of the US Senate. And in that role today, Senator Elizabeth Warren. I'll comply with all the ethical guidelines. That's not the question. You and I, you have said repeatedly.

You're asking me, Senator, you're asking me not to serve vaccine companies. You and I, you have said we're committed to both ends of the fireman's heart. No, I am not. My question is not in the richie. No, you are. That's exactly what you're doing. No. Look, no one should be fooled here. As Secretary of HHS, Robert Kennedy will have the power to undercut vaccines and vaccine

manufacturing across our country. And for all of his talk about follow the science and his promise that he won't interfere with those of us who want to vaccinate his kids, the bottom line is the same. Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it. Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in. Senator, I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule. Yeah, so it's just it's excited a cash Patel is in front of the firing squad. He is the president's pick to run the FBI.

I don't think there's a more controversial pick than him. The one clip I've seen of him, he seems to have acquitted himself very well. But listen, just because you can take take the questions of the senators doesn't mean you're gonna be good at your job. It doesn't mean you should have that job. But in that one clip I saw,

he went toe to toe and acquitted himself quite well. The View is an awful show. It's an awful show. It's long in the tooth and way past its prime. And the women on that show, by and large, do and say things that I find distasteful, to say the least.

There are a couple of them who are particularly egregious, but it is what it is. I mean, Frank, I don't know why the show's still on the air. I think it's because people like us talk about it and the curiosity factor has people tuning in every now and then. But Joy Behar, who apparently is a standup comic, I've never seen her say anything funny,

but apparently she's stand-up comic. I've never seen her say anything funny, but apparently she's a stand-up comic. She took issue, as she would, with Donald Trump's new press secretary, Carolyn Leavitt. And she suspects she knows the reason Carolyn Leavitt was hired. She's probably been put in there because according to Donald Trump, she's a 10. You know that's what it is.

I wanna be clear though, it's not her first job. It was her first press briefing. She worked in the previous Trump administration. Look, I've made my opinions clear on toxic femininity. I have experienced it firsthand. I have seen the destructive nature of mean girl culture. And it is as mean and it is as destructive as anything I've ever seen a man do. And I know it for a fact and no one's going to tell me I'm wrong because I know the people who

do it and they do it with glee. That's the difference between a man and a woman. A woman who conducts themselves in this manner does so with a particular level of glee. They enjoy it, they relish in it. And if a man had said what she had said, we would be talking about it a lot more today. I don't know any men who talk about how a woman looks who's in a position of power like Carolyn Leavitt. Very powerful, probably got the, by all accounts,

she was tremendous on her first day, didn't miss a beat, slid right in, took questions like she'd been doing it forever. And yeah, men will comment on what a woman looks like in private, but I don't know anybody with a microphone or a TV camera who would ever say what these women said, ever. A, they know it's wrong. And if they don't know it's wrong, self-preservation would force them to keep their mouth shut.

But girl on girl comments like that happen all the time. And I can't explain it, but I'm not allowed to have an opinion on that because I have a penis. So we'll just leave that one there. Okay, so that's one side, that's the left. On the right, they can be just as bad. And the right-wing news channel Newsmax

was mocking Latino migrant deportation orders and the complaints that the Latino community was having by eating a taco on air. What are you gonna do? You gonna come take it out of my ham? I'm gonna eat half this plate during the break. Maybe I'll call the ICE hotline. I don't know if I'll have enough time. For sure, all kidding aside, this is actually really good taco. These people broke the law. They broke the law to get here. Yeah, they broke the law.

I agree. I think there are a lot of people from, there's probably a broad consensus, left and right, that criminals who are in the United States who got there illegally should leave and they should be deported. I think a lot of people are happy about that. But to be so crass, to be so condescending, to be so high and mighty, to do something like that, I don't subscribe to that. I find that repugnant. I find it beneath whoever you are. I don't even know who you are. I don't know that host. I've never seen Newsmax, but it should be beneath how an American behaves in a moment like that. That's gross. It's gross. And if you found it funny, you're probably gross too.

Because there's not a lot. There's a lot to say, hey, job well done, you're doing what you said you were going to do, and you're getting rid of the people that you said you were going to get rid of who don't belong there, they are criminals, but to relish in it, to bathe in it, it's smug and it's gross. Oh, we got time. Okay, so Gad Sad on Joe Rogan, one a great guest we've ever had on this show. Find him on our podcast. He said that buying Twitter was the most important thing Elon Musk ever did. Literally within a few days of it being, maybe even the same day of it being announced that he was buying it,

I had put out a clip on my channel where I said of all things that Elon Musk has ever done or will ever do, none will ever count as much as him having bought Twitter. are still to come. Told by the best journalists in the country. I'm Donna Friesen in Berlin. Just keep your head down. He's away, he's away, go, go, go. Watch cannabis' number one national newscast. A rail strike could cost this one southern Alberta farm as much as a million dollars. The award-winning Global National with Donna Friesen.