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Page THE HERALD OUTLOOK Saturday November 11 1989 the HERALD OUTLOOK Is published each Saturday by the HALTON HILLS HERALD Home Newspaper of Halton Hills A Division of Canadian Newspapers Company Limited at Guelph Street Georgetown Ontario 8772201 St Class Mail Registered Number PUBLISHER David A EDITOR Brian MacLeod AD MANAGER Dan Taylor Donna Kell Ben COUNTING Diane Smith 1 1 ADVFRTISING Joan Craig Teeter Roberts PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT Dave Hastings Supt Annie Olsen Wilson CIRC Marie Who will buy those big glitzy department stores SNAFU Bruce Diane Maley Your Business Thomson Who will buy America depart stores Glitzy Bloom s Saks Fifth Avenue are going begging for buyers Mar shall Field also is up for sale Bonwit Teller B Altman and Co and Miller and Rhoades all retailers have filed for protection under S insolvency laws while they sell off assets The problem with selling now it seems is timing The North American expansion is going into its eighth year Would be buyers believe the best retail sales are over at least for the current cycle and earnings growth has peaked But the problems with depart stores run deeper than that For the past 15 years Canadian stores such as Eaton Simpsons and The Bay have been struggling to find a new place for themselves in a market that has gone increas ingly to cut price specialty store chains whether K Mart Canadian Tire or Consumers Distributing SHOPPERS PARADISE For a while it seemed that runn ing an old fashioned department store had become too expensive Clerks became increasingly scarce delivery less frequent and catalogues non existent Then the stores took a big step upmarket opening fancy bouti ques and food departments In the large cities at least department stores are the place to shop After all where else can you stroll through aisles bedecked like a sultan palace Christmas shopp ing to the strains of a harp or a grand piano Still most of us can count at least one local department store that is no more Regular shoppers will admit they miss it even though the new shopping malls with their big parking lots make shopping faster and easier Bloomingdale which its owner Robert Campeau thought would fetch billion US or so on the open market looks to be worth a lot less than Mr Campeau anticipated One Japanese store chain is said to be preparing a 1 3 billion bid Yet s will con to thrive no matter who owns it because of its position in the New York A more in teresting question perhaps is whether big department stores in Canada will enjoy a renaissance I think they wilL Department stores are part of our heritage mirroring our dreams and fantasies They are part of our past preserved in the present The whole world has changed but department stores have changed less Berrys World by Inc Oh lor the good of days when only the HORSES got doped up First thing I II do is go back to the day before I was married and call the whole thing off Have we lost interest in high bank charges OTTAWA Whither the Clara De Gruchys and Pizzas of yesteryear Or the Jack Mastan dreas for that matter If these names ring only the faintest of bells think banks More precisely bank service charges Just 18 months ago the country was with the issue as the Commons finance committee studied changes to the Bank Act In the process the abovementioned became symbols of the often ridiculous charges levied by banks Clara De Gruchy was charged by an Ottawa branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia to change a bill to two 5 bills and in quarters The same bank started charging GoGo Pizza of 40 cents for every roll of change it re quested Another unnamed bank charg Jack for depositing a cheque that was filled out Jack was one year old and the cheque was a birth day gift from hi grandmother At the height of the controversy last spring the finance committee reported it had 2 letters from Canadians complaining about vice charges Once the dust settled the banks agreed to drop a variety of charges on basic services They also pro mised to do a better job responding to customer complaints At the same time the govern introduced legislation requir banks to clearly list all service charges and to provide at least days notice of fee increases I INTEREST So has the sound and fury abated with these changes Have Canadians lost interest so to speak in the issue The answer ap pears to be yes New Democrat MP John Rodriguez who raised Clara Gruchy s amazing story in the Commons says the number of complaints his office has slumped Last spring he was averaging 25 complaints per week That has dropped off con siderably to a couple a week at the most the Nickel Belt MP said in an interview I do get the odd one but it has certainly tailed off The federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial In stitutions has seen the same defla of concern Between August 1988 and August the office heard from 158 Canadians unhappy with bank service charges and another who felt the same way about other institutions such as trust com pension plans and in companies would say in the last six mon ths we have had four complaints about bank service charges said spokesperson Nancy Murphy 1 But the bank service charges issue was never really very high on the list of the kinds of enquiries we have received in the last year and a half Most carping to the office these days concerns mortgage agreements not service fees creditE the banks with the downturn They came down very quickly and part of that is a result of the banks work to set up mechanisms where people can right out loud to the people they re deal ing with rather than us she said TOOK STEPS Rodriguez never a bank booster grudgingly concedes that the banks are cleaning up their act I think when the finance com turned up the rock everybody scurried for cover The banks realized they had a real public relations mess on their hands and they ve taken steps to make sure it s handled a lot more professionally and sensitively than in the past The nature of the complaints has also changed We find that what most people really need is to get touch with the right person at the head or regional office of their bank to Weve studied transportation 80 times All the fuss over the Lake business has been a terrible distraction of late allowing other even historic events to slip by without comment One of these events surely is the new Royal Commission on a Na tional Passenger Transportation System for the Twenty First Cen Now if that s not an event of historic proportions I don know what is Not because of what this massive nine member panel is likely to recommend mind you It s historic because it happens to be get ready for this the royal commission since Confederation to study transportation in Canada No we re not kidding Eighty You re probably thinking this is a miscount that the total number of ALL royal commissions since Confederation totals No there is no mistake in this respect The ludicrous total for all commissions is 450 But let concentrate only on transportation since this is the subject of the latest royal sion And it perhaps worth men turning another historic aspect this might be the first time a royal commission has been appointed after the government made it amp ly clear what it intended to do about transportation First it was announced that VIA Rail passenger service would be cut in half and then came the revelation that there would be a new royal commission into transportation Traditionally the studies have come first But we had a special case here The government was determined to tnm its annual sub sidy to VIA through a cutback in service while at the same time equally determined to give Cana dians some reason to hope that all was not lost Who knows by the time we head into the next election campaign in or so there could be a freshly minted royal commission report urging the establishment of a fan new rail passenger service in Canada Naturally the govern would commit itself to giving these recbmmendations priority attention its next mandate Royal commissions are great for that sort of thing Even the establishment of such a study in dicates a positive approach such as when the Mulroney government set up its Rail Passenger Action Force in That group Incidentally mended a revitalizatlon of passenger trains in Canada Oh well its views are probably out of date by now So to make sure the government gets the proper guidance to help Canadians get around in the next century we have this new royal commission probably the largest ever to study transportation in Canada We say probably because you can no doubt the difficulty of researching the composition of 79 previous commissions whose works are