Taking Advantage

I started this morning at Head Harbour Lighthouse and ended my excursion at the Park. It was a longer than usual trip because I was enjoying the calm between storms. This Lighthouse is also called East Quoddy to distinguish it from the West Quoddy in Maine (you can just see the latter in one of the images below).

It is necessary to speak about the weather (again). Yesterday morning presented us with the culmination of 36 hours of high winds (very high at the end) and heavy rain. Then there was a dramatic change. The winds died out, the rain stopped, and the temperature fell. Late morning it was 11C (52F) – by 2:00 pm it was at the freezing level. This morning it was -11C (12F).

My phone was going nuts. It kept cycling through Wind Warnings, Rain Warnings, and Flash Freeze Warnings. I really didn’t need them to tell me – I was living it. 🙂

The good news is that only a few customers lost power on the Island. We’ve been very lucky so far.

On a totally different subject, and one which will only be of interest to my Canadian readers, I’d like to speak a bit about Canada Post.

I rely heavily on this organization – with the amount of online shopping I have to do I would be in a lot of trouble without them. In fact, I recently had to tell Amazon to stop shipping things to me via UPS because that company doesn’t deliver here. They wind up handing it over to the Post Office anyway and the records get all muddled up.

The other day I was on Twitter and one of those “promoted” tweets appeared. This one was from Canada Post announcing that they have a new sideline. I mean, I know that businesses are always looking for new revenue streams, however having a venerable institution with a pretty narrow niche suddenly go into money lending seems a little bizarre.

You can now borrow from $1,000 to $30,000 from the Post Office. I looked up the fine print and some of the highlights include:

• Loans are for 7 years, although you can pay them off early.
• If you’re a good credit risk you will pay 3.75% over Prime. On the other end of the scale the interest rate will be 13.25% over Prime.
• Note that at 10% you will repay twice the amount of the loan over that period.

I can think of a few people who could wind up in a mess of trouble if they take advantage of this “new opportunity”. It’s hard to imagine, apart from a way to generate income from those who can’t get money directly from a bank, why they thought this was a good idea. Personally I think it’s exploitative. This might be one reason they didn’t ask me. 🙂