November 2021 – Andrew Goldenberg

Thoughts on the Worker Shortage

27 Nov

The last few months, I’ve been reading quite a few articles where business owners are speaking out about not being able to find suitable staff to work in their establishments. According to many of these business owners the issue stems from Government handouts and the fact that “people just don’t want to work”.

I personally believe this all to be a massive falsehood being perpetuated by business owners, who for a long time, have profited off the backs of their workers and now are actually having to adapt and pay their staff what they are worth.

Before the pandemic hit Canada, restaurants and bars had plenty of staff who were serving their patrons. It is my contention that a majority of these people fall into a very specific camp that now have more options.

The camp I am referring to is people who are stuck in a job they don’t want, with an emlpoyer who treats them poorly, and before the pandemic, they really could not afford to train or branch out for a new job and a new beginning. What the pandemic has shown is that when you give someone who feels they are in a dead end job or are being mistreated by their employer and opportunity at a better life, most of them will take it.

The main argument I hear is that with Food costs and overhead, these poor restaurants and bars can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage, and need their patrons to supplement their workers income via tipping. I’m sorry but anyone who can do even basic math knows that is simply untrue.

A 10KG bag of flour costs a REGULAR customer roughly $14, not someone buying in bulk or regularly taking delivery of large quantites of flour. An average pizza shop (mom and pop not chain) charges anywhere between $10 and $20 for a pizza. Doing some simple math you can easily see that a regular bag of flour pays for itself with the sale of a single pizza. Even factoring in toppings, sauce, and cheese, a pizza still has very healthy margins if you’re selling a quality pizza and have regular customers (literally everyone is ordering in at the moment) there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t pay your staff a living wage.

I’m sorry but that argument is absolute bull shit!

Avoid PlayOJO Like the Plague!

11 Nov

Many of you may know that I generally like gambling and find it to be a fun passtime if you can afford it.

That being said, it’s incredibly difficult to find an “honest” casino much like it’s hard to find a reasonably priced lawyer. Almost every online casino boasts some kind of rediculous RTP or “Return to Player”. This is the amount of funds returned to the playerbase by the casino. The problem with that is it is incredibly untruthful.

Let me explain.

A lot of casinos will show the RTP of a given slot machine as being 96-97%. Meaning 97 cents of every dollar gambled is rewarded back to the player base. What they generally don’t explain is the percentage is based on millions if not billions of slot bets.

So lets say over the course of a year you gamble $1,000 in theory $960 of that is returned to the player base however, what it really means is you lost a grand and at some point they will give that $960 to someone else. RTP is not based on a single player but rather the whole playerbase. This means an online casino can suck millions of dollars out of its player base, and then reward a couple players with $100K and keep the rest of the balance while remaining true to their RTP. In other words, it’s a load of bull shit!

One of the most egregious offenders is PlayOJO.com. If you have a look on TrustPilot.com PlayOJO has one of the worst ratings possible. The reason for this is a couple of things.

Their support staff are incompetent for the most part.
They are completely unaware of how Interac works while still offering it as a deposit and withdrawal mechanism.
They advertise themselves as the worlds “fairest” casino which is an outright lie.
Their games payout very infrequently. I will say I have one a large sum here once but that was over the course of 3 years gambling on this one specific site.
Bonus games never pay and usually pay out the pitty amount.

Specifically with item #5 a lot of the games have bonus games triggered by three scatter icons on the slot reels. Generally these bonus games will have a pitty payment (a minimum it’ll pay out regardless of the result of the bonus game). This is generally the only amount you’re going to see which is typically 10x your bet. So a bet of $1 would yield $10 IF you hit an extremely rare bonus as they come up very infrequently.

Some games allow you to buy the bonus game at a rate of 100x your bet level. If you want a $5 bonus, it’ll cost you $500 and likely pay you $50. So the game providers value the bonus at 100x and very seldom will ever pay more than 10x. PlayOJO is one of the worst offenders of this. The games on their site very rarely, if ever go above that pitty pay of 10x your bet and in the course of playing $100 you would be very lucky to see a single bonus game.

If you’re looking for an online casino to try out, let me recommend Wildz.com. While they also do not pay out all the time, they frequently hit bonuses that pay at least over the 10x multiple so you don’t feel like you got robbed when you played $200 worth and then land a bonus for $20.

As always, only gamble what you can afford to loose, and if you need a resource or help with a gambling problem, please reach out to BeGambleAware.

Gambling is something to do for fun once in a while and you will never break even or even come close, so please only every gamble what you can afford to loose, and don’t ever try and win it back once you’ve lost it. If you feel the need to, you’ve gambled too much and should seek help at BeGambleAware.