The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Are Those The Same Clothes You've Been Wearing For Four Months?

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Back after two Canada Day holidays off, a serious potpourri of little stories for you.

and hello there Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily and welcome back welcome back from the Canada Day break Wow Two days off in the middle of a week. Never even got that at the CBC in all those years. But I thank the producers and owners of the Bridge Daily for allowing me to do that. So there I am saying thank you to myself. Anyway, so what are we going to do today? Thursday I lost track of which week this is 16, week 16

Here's my ideas I've seen a lot of stuff in the last couple of days I've just been relaxing Reading Filing away some ideas. And, you know, I hit on quite a few. None of them are, like, huge. But all of them, I think, at least to me, are worth mentioning, talking about a little bit. So I'm going to run through some of these.

They're all available in different places, in newspapers, online, magazines. The Economist, the latest Economist. I'm going to start off with this one. The latest Economist points out that across the world, millions of tenants have stopped paying rent, leading to chaos among shopping mall and office landlords. This is all a result, obviously, of the pandemic

and, you know, stores and offices closing. This could lead to a sharp shift, says the economist, in how commercial buildings are used and great attention towards restructuring and re-imaging for investors. Now, this is a big deal. It's happening around the world, and it involves millions, if not billions, of dollars in investments. And the economist concludes that hotels may need to become apartment blocks. Think about that.

Think about your favorite hotel. Nobody in it. So what do they do? Well, at a certain point, they've got to cut bait on their losses and they've got to do something. And the economist is suggesting one of the considerations here is turning hotels into apartment blocks.

Malls, says the economist, may need to be reincarnated as e-commerce fulfillment centers. You know, as all those stores have gone out of business, the business has been taken over by e-sales, e-commerce. So they're having to expand in terms of where they operate out of. And the economist is wondering whether that's what malls will become. These e-commerce fulfillment centers, they call them. And office blocks, well, we've talked about this since the beginning.

Office blocks may need to be refurbished so the desks are further apart. Remember we went through this whole thing about nobody could have a private office anymore? Everybody needed to be side by each in offices? Well, you wonder whether there's going to be an end to that. Now, I'm going to read a couple of sentences from the actual article, because I think the economist puts this in some context here for us, this whole issue and why it's important. The immediate problem is that tenants are behind on the rent. Every recession involves sporadic delinquencies, but the lockdowns have led to

anarchy in some bits of the property business. Perhaps a quarter, a quarter of freestanding shops, half of mall tenants, you know, we got a mall here on the outskirts of Stratford and it's very quiet and it's been reopened for a week or two. There's space available in there. What isn't available from the look of it, the quick look I've taken, are customers. They're not going into malls. Not here anyway.

Half of mall tenants, 60% of restaurants in America and other Western markets are not paying their dues. Can't afford to pay their rent. 60% of restaurants. Remember I told you last week, I've seen the stats for Canada. Two out of three restaurants, unless we start supporting them, whether it's takeout or patio or whatever it is, unless they get support,

two out of three restaurants in Canada is going to go out of business. They will be no more by the end of the year. This can be a spontaneous rebellion or landlords may have offered holidays. And that is the case in some generous landlords who said, look, we know you're under the gun. We know you're not open.

We know you have no revenue. We know you can't pay rent. So let's go on a rent holiday for a while as long as the landlord can handle it. Some cities and some governments have introduced moratoriums, and that's correct, saying that landlords can't charge rent if the businesses are shut down because of the pandemic. That, too, can only last so long.

Landlords have taken a hit to their income. So far they have been unwilling or unable to repossess buildings that may have no other prospective tenant. A growing number have defaulted on their debts. Commercial mortgage-backed securities, which bundle up property loans, have seen delinquency rates exceed the levels in the financial crisis of 2007-8-9. So just to conclude the section I wanted to read from this Economist article. Temporary delinquencies are only part of the problem. In the longer run, the uses of property

may change. E-commerce activity has risen to the level pundits had thought it would reach three to five years from now, speeding up the decline of bricks and mortar shops and boosting demand for warehouses. Firms that have found remote working tolerable may shrink the office space they hire. Video calls in lieu of business trips could reduce the number of hotel nights billed.

Even as economies open up again, there are signs that behavior may have changed permanently. The latest mobility tracking data suggests that activity in offices in America is 36% below normal levels, 15% below the usual level for retail and recreation spaces such as restaurants, shops, and cinemas. Remember early in the pandemic, we talked to Dan Gardner. To me, he's a futurist. He thinks about the future and what it's going to be like, but he warns you very quickly that in the past, when people start predicting what may happen, they usually end up wrong.

And in past cases, when we've talked about how the world is changing and everything's changing, well, in fact, you know, it didn't really change that much. Are we in a different situation now? I don't know. When we talked to Dan, that was at least three months ago. This has been going on for four months now, and there's no immediate end in sight. Have restrictions been lifted somewhat? Yes, absolutely they have. But are we back to normal, whatever that means now? No, we're not. And every indication is it's going to be a while before we are.

And when we look at our neighbors south of the border, you go, please, please, please don't let that be us. The only way it won't be us is if we take control of the situation. We keep social distancing. We wear our masks. We wash our hands. We do all the things that we're being asked to do. And if we do them, if we follow those guidelines, the odds are we're going to be okay.

We're still going to be living in a pandemic world, but we are not going to be like our friends south of the border. You know, I read somewhere today that, you know, we talk about the border, should it be open, and it keeps being extended, the closing of the border, another two weeks here, another 30 days there. I read today that it's going to be closed for a year. A year. Not going to be closed for a year. A year.

Not going to get any argument from me. I'm fine with that. All right, moving on. These are kind of fun. They're certainly interesting. Taking a good look at the clothes you've been wearing for the last four months. I know in my case, you know, I do, I don't know, at least once a week, at least once a week, sometimes a couple times a week, I'm involved in a board meeting of some kind on the boards that I'm on.

And they're done by Zoom and you feel, you know, I'm not going to wear a suit. I'm not going to wear a jacket and tie. I'm not going to wear a tie. But I am going to wear a proper shirt. Not a t-shirt like I wear 99% of the rest of the time. And as a result, I've got the same shirt hanging in my closet that I've been wearing at all these meetings for four months. It's still perfectly pressed, looks great.

Anyway, I saw this in the New York Times. The professional shirt that you put on for work video calls, that's me, and then take it off after calls, mostly to wear something more comfortable around the home, that's me. The piece even quotes in the New York Times, a man who has worn the same short-sleeve button-down for approximately 70 consecutive days. Well, I haven't done that.

A poll also found that only 10% of people get dressed for working at home at the start of the day and change into comfortable clothes later. NBC News. Let's track this as well. But this is like so true, right? The clothes we've got used to wearing now and the clothes we don't wear anymore.

When it was cold, all I wore were sweats. You know, I've got, I don't know, three or four different pairs of blue jeans. I haven't worn them once during the whole pandemic. I either wore sweats the first few months or shorts for the last few months. The shirt situation I've explained to you, my suits are all still hanging in the closet. I haven't been touched in four months. I think I wore a sports jacket once for one Zoom call TV program that I was doing.

Now, here's another clothing-related story. You know how you can go on Google or any search engine, you punch in a couple of words, and things pop up? Well, Google says searches for this particular item have spiked in recent weeks. This was in the Wall Street Journal. You know what the item was? Elastic waste. People seeking looser-fitting clothes after months of remaining at home

and indulging in pandemic-induced stress eating, among other trends. Well, I'm happy to say I have not put on weight but I can see how that can happen I mean I'm eating more probably of the wrong things but I'm exercising more so I'm staying ahead of the game not by a lot, trust me

but I have in fact noticed and hear anecdotally, that some of you are putting on weight. So this has spilled over into the market as some third-party sellers at retailers such as Amazon are quick to notice the trend and are pricing the larger sizes more expensive than the smaller sizes. Really? They would do that?

While other retailers, consumers, are returning clothes they bought and realized they do not fit in their typical pre-pandemic sizes, cutting into the company's profits. Okay, there's your clothing section for today. Now here's one I got to tell you I would not have thought of. Bloomberg reports that printers, printers, are staging a comeback.

And why is that? Well, apparently, people were using their offices to print up things they needed at home. And so they use their office computer at work and push print and stuff would pour out of the print machine at the office. Well now that they're not at the office but they still need print copies and they didn't have a printer at home because they were relying on the office, they have to go out and buy one so they can print at home. Bloomberg reporting that home printers are staging a comeback as people brought their work-issued laptops home but left their printers at the office and find that they still need to print out the sort of things that they used to surreptitiously print at the office. HP Hewlett Packard is also pushing subscriptions to its Instant Ink delivery service,

which counted more than 7 million customers last month. That's just in the States. Up from 6 million in February. Printers. Go figure. All right. You know how much I love airline stories. I mean, if you've listened to this podcast before,

you know that I love airline stories. I mean, if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that I love airline stories. I found this one interesting. It was in the Financial Times over the weekend. The FT shares an update around Lufthansa's plans to offer their

passengers COVID-19 tests. Partnered with the German company Centogene at Frankfurt Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world. You know, if you're going somewhere in Europe, the odds are you fly into Frankfurt and then you take a separate flight elsewhere. Frankfurt's very busy, and it's kind of the connection point to all points,

you know, into the Middle East, and if you're going in that direction, to parts of Southeast Asia. So Lufthansa wants to partner with the German company Syntogen at Frankfurt Airport to provide results within a couple of hours that can be linked to individual tickets. Why would they do this? It's an effort to avoid mandatory quarantine upon landing at your destination. As you know, some destinations in different parts of the world,

you immediately go into quarantine until you can prove in a test that you're negative. So this, what Lufthansa is doing, is you take the test before you get on the plane. The result comes either if you're there early enough before you get on the plane, or it's transmitted to you while you're on the flight before you get to your destination. And when you get to your destination, you have your test showing you're negative on COVID-19. And it's a way, Lufthansa feels, that you will be able to avoid the quarantining.

Now, if that works and it's accepted by other countries, that's a model that a lot of airlines are going to try and figure out how to do. I mean, they've got to get the proper testing equipment and the proper testing that can be done within a matter of hours instead of days. All of that's available now, but they've got to get their hands on it. One other airline point. Isn't this fun, all the little information you're getting out of this one little podcast today? Here it is. American Airlines.

After capping the number of people on flights since April, American Airlines recently announced that its planes will likely be full as soon as this week, which means the old, we're going to keep the middle row vacant for you. That's not going to work much longer. Washington Post says airlines are going to drop that if they haven't already dropped that promise because people are starting to fly again. I don't know how I feel about that. I am not ready to get on a plane that's packed.

Sorry. Not me. That's not going to happen. It's certainly not going to happen until I'm much more comfortable with the big picture. I am comfortable with flying, and I do agree with the arguments that are, you know, I heard a flight attendant tell a friend the other day, the safest place to be right now is on an airplane. She's never seen the way those planes are cleaned between flights. Never seen anything like it.

The disinfectants that are used throughout the airplane, every nook and cranny. Everything is cleaned. Your ventilation systems have been improved on most planes. They were already pretty darn good. And arguably, the best air you're ever going to be breathing is on an airplane because of those systems. All right, last point, and it's kind of related to the airplane business, and it's something that's in the Atlantic.

It's just an idea. I mean, you know what happens when there's been an aircraft incident? In the United States, the National Transport Safety Board immediately begins an investigation. Everything's locked down. All the so-called black boxes, which aren't black, they're usually red on airplanes, are taken. All their recordings that are on those black boxes, everything from the conversations between the pilots and the air traffic control to the way all the different mechanisms on the plane are working. All that is immediately put on hold. Interviews are taken with all the people

who have some involvement in the incident on the plane. It takes weeks, if not months, in some cases years, before there's a final assessment from the NTSB about what happened. Same kind of thing happens here in Canada with the Canadian Safety Board. So the Atlantic tries to imagine that if the NTSB was brought in to look at the Trump administration's handling of the pandemic's early days, using their skill in investigating the timeline of a disaster,

such as a plane crash, systemic analysis of dangerously fatal steps, and a deep understanding of how to operate the bureaucracy to accomplish public safety. That's an interesting theory. Whether there should be that detailed an examination of what happened by a body totally independent that comes in and basically strips away every single thing that happened and concludes not only what happened, not only

determines and assesses blame, but perhaps most importantly, suggests what should happen in the future to avoid such a catastrophe. Because no matter what happens on COVID-19, when and if it ever ends, well, it'll end. So when it ends, no matter what happens, there needs to be some form of detailed examination and suggestions to ensure the way this one was handled can't happen again. And we always say that, I mean, as we talked earlier in the life of this podcast, after the 1918 flu, there were recommendations made about how Canada should be prepared for the next pandemic. You know, within 10 years, all of that had been forgotten and things weren't done. There are those who argue now that after SARS,

which wasn't that long ago, there were a lot of recommendations made to ensure that we were ready if another potential pandemic hit. Well, there are many people who say we weren't. That the recommendations from the past weren't followed, and we weren't prepared. Well, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, because there are obviously going to be investigations into this, and it will be determined whether or not mistakes were made and how to ensure they aren't made again.

All right, well, that's your special kind of Thursday of a holiday week, potpourri of different things the way I'm talking about tomorrow is Friday the weekend special although I got to tell you I guess because of the holidays and people have been trying to enjoy themselves while these this has been a week of some of the most listened to podcasts that we've done ever since we started the daily. Haven't been a lot of letters. So if you get some in tonight that'll be good. If you don't, well we'll find

something else to talk about tomorrow. There's always something to talk about. And tomorrow the big reveal. The reveal on the cover of the new book that's coming out by me and my good friend Mark Bulgich. We're going to reveal what the cover looks like.

The book is not actually available until November 10th, but Simon & Schuster, the publisher, has the big push on, and they've got cooperation from a number of different places. Indigo for one, Costco for another. I did an interview with Costco just last week. They're going to feature the book in their magazine. I guess they do a monthly magazine which comes out it's a particular one that i did the interview for will come out in i guess october getting ready for the november launch so there's a lot of excitement around that

and tomorrow's the big reveal and i'll show you how you can look at it too. Easiest way is on, you know, either on my Twitter feed or my Instagram feed or on my website at thepetermansbridge.com. So that'll all be out tomorrow. Okay. If you've got something to write, don't be shy. TheMansBridgePodcast at gmail.com. The shy. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. So, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the Bridge Daily. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.