We’ve started putting NO RIGHT ON RED signs at intersections, and motorists are still running over pedestrians!

You can’t design away stupidity. The danger is people behind the wheel of these aerodynamic tanks.

I’m using well.ca but their selection isn’t as expansive (as expected).

But free shipping over $35, which is VERY reasonable. I’ll keep them bookmarked for future reference!

I don’t mean to talk negatively at all, and their product looks amazing (especially with the added context you’ve provided).

For me, based on my own experience and the huge amount of storage needed to keep my photos/videos safe, it’s not cost-effective for me personally. If the choice was any of the other paid services or Ente, I think Ente would be the clear winner from the sound of it.

I hear you. When we were fostering, we tried not to burden the shelter with supplying food, so Amazon or Walmart were very convenient (free shipping and lower prices from what you’d find locally for the same items).

But for pet food to feed our own, there’s a MASSIVE increase in cost just from buying made in Canada products. Our cat food expenses are more expensive for two cats eating Canadian cat food, than it was for five adults eating brand name American cat food.

It’s hard to balance, but you just gotta do what you can.

One suggestion in your case is to contact retailers who have products reaching their Best Before date, as they may be able to offer a much lower price. I know that shelters often get nearly expired products as donations, and they easily make use of it!

Yes, I’ve been building a database of “things I’ll need to buy, but not just yet”, and it’s cool to discover new Canadian companies in the process!

I don’t mind stocking up on things, and traditionally do that with certain items. It’s the one-offs that might be easy when you’re shopping on Amazon, but are harder to find cost-effective alternatives to, that I’m stuggling with.

Still, every day I find something new and tweak how my money is spent, so it’s worth the effort!

As a temporary workaround, maybe you can see if there are people nearby who also need the item you are purchasing? Buying something in bulk and sharing it with others, could help somewhat

This is a nice solution for many, I’m sure. I may look into local buyer’s groups to see what they can offer. I think most of the ones I’ve seen deal with bulk meat, and I’m vegan, so… LOL

Like with all other online services, it’s cheap until your collection grows. I basically outpaced Google Drive (at the time), and it would have been significantly more expensive to continue with their paid plans. So, I invested in hardware. LOL

But realistically, if you have a smaller photo/video collection, then I think it would be just as easy to spend $5-10 a month and forget about it. I was working with decades worth of images, so I would quickly outgrow any 1, 2, 3TB plans.

I may have tried the demo at some point (along with other Self-hosted solutions for photo backup), but Synology Photos does what I want without any real setup.

For search, I use a paid software called Excire Foto (German origin) that uses local-AI. I point it to my network folder, and it creates its own database away from my originals. Expensive software, but it’s been worth it. Synology photos also has searching by subject, but Excire is far more contextual and easily beats out anything that Google Photos offered.

I have a small rice cooker that I use when making a meal for myself (a larger instant pot for family meals). I’ve been doing 1:2 ratio, per package. I turn the rice cooker on, and it’s done after about 15-20 minutes, depending on what else I add to it. Suuuper easy.

And yet, I’m seeing waaaaaayyyy too many Conservative election signs in front of people’s homes.

Not totally surprised, since they also think that Doug Ford is doing an amazing job, so why not have a planless federal party in charge, too? 🫠

What I’ve been trying to do with food items directly from farmers, is to see where they sell their products locally. Most are at farmer’s markets (which aren’t year-round) and others are at specialty shops that are even more out of the way.

Some things, I just bite the bullet and take some extra effort to go get. The Canadian yeast I bought for bread making had me bike over to the next municipality to pick up. Which I’m happy to do!

One tip is to perhaps group up shopping in bigger chunks?

Yup, I’ve been doing this for certain (non-perishable goods and non-food consumables), but shelf-life and product type can make this difficult or impossible to do on a practical basis.

I am in the process of optimizing my pantry, and will do the same on a need-to basis with other areas of my life. I really only plan to buy things that I can reliably get locally or with little effort, while still supporting Canadian businesses.

I’m proud to say that I haven’t given Walmart any of my money since the trade war began, despite being a place I would shop at multiple times a week.

My Synology NAS is set up as RAID, so there’s redundancy built in.

Then I have daily backups to an external drive (automatic, so there’s no intervention).

In addition to (automatic) daily encrypted cloud backup (which I’m looking for an alternative due to rising costs). Ideally, I’d love to set up a second, smaller NAS somewhere else to offset the cloud backup costs.

Then I have a monthly backup on physical media kept secured outside of my home.

But my NAS handles way more than just photos and video, so this low effort is really covering all kinds of data.

I made the switch to self-hosting in part to reduce subscription costs of various services, and I’m sure that by now my setup has paid for itself.

Regardless of how Amazon is doing it, I’m sure many people simply buy from them because of the free shipping. When I was using them for grocery items, they’d list products for less than local + they’d deliver it free the same or next day. It’s very hard to beat that, but I’m trying.

I’m trying to take advantage of any “free shipping” being offered by Canadian businesses out of town or out of the province. But if I only need $20-30 worth of a food item, it kills me to have to pay almost as much to ship it.

I’m seeing this being even more of an issue when I’m looking at supporting farmers who don’t sell their products locally, but they also aren’t set up to be shipping cheaply, either.

Yes, I’d like to see that, too! More informed the consumer, the better (for consumers! LOL).

Thank you. Any reason why they wouldn’t make it more apparent from their homepage? I’m always interested in self-hosted solutions, and even I ducked out of there after seeing only subscription plans being offered.

No, they definitely contain some imported product per the company’s own definition.

Their definition says: “Prepared in Canada are products that have been entirely prepared in Canada from domestic and imported ingredients, or imported ingredients only.”

They aren’t importing the product, only ingredients. And the percent of imported ingredients could be a very small amount of the final product.

As a quick example from one of the items at the top of their list “Farm Boy™ Original Taralli” contains “Enriched Wheat Flour • Water • Canola Oil” and is listed as “prepared in Canada”. It’s possible that the wheat and canola oil are imported, but both wheat and canola oil are easily available in Canada, so it could very well be a product that’s 90% made from Canadian ingredients. Even if all the ingredients were imported, the final product was made (i.e. prepared) here.

Yes, it sucks that they can’t just use a Made in Canada for those items, but I’ll defer to my possible explanation in my previous reply.

My only concern is making sure consumers see this labeling for what it is: trying to glom onto the pro-Canadian bandwagon without meeting the only legally protected standards for labeling Canadian foods there are. Your decision as to what is worth supporting is your own, but you may think you’re supporting a team of x number of employees when in actuality one guy slapping the sticker on the box itself meets their definition of ‘prepared in Canada’. Meanwhile actual Products of Canada or Made in Canada foods are potentially losing out on your support.

I do agree, and there is cause for concern when you have labels being misused or misinterpreted.

Public education and further standards are needed. It’s pretty impressive how far we’ve already come in the last month, so I’m sure things will get better as the industry adapts.

My preference is still to seek out Products of Canada from Canadian brands. And as long as American ingredients and products are kept off my shopping list, I’ll still be happy to support “Prepared in Canada using imported ingredients” when they are the only option.

I’m glad it’s been running well for you! My perspective is “what would convince consumers to ditch their car?”, and also, “how can we avoid disposable bikes?”

So in that vein, I think that warranty needs to be stronger across the board.

But why do that??? No need for a sale only to be out of stock for prolonged periods of time. Most people who were looking to buy would have moved on because of that.

Such a shame. I have to find a replacement for some Saucony trail runners! LOL

Is it?? They don’t make that evident anywhere on their website. All I see is a pricing page with no hint that it can be self-hosted.

You know what would be even easier? Not putting any label. I’d rather have no label than one that implies significant Canadian input for something consisting of “100% imported ingredients”.

I see where you’re coming from, but I guess it depends on your threshold as a consumer.

If consumers know what “Prepared in Canada” implies (i.e. that the ingredients could be 100% imported, per their description), at least they can make a decision to support the employees who prepared the good here in Canada… or to avoid the product.

I certainly want to know either way, since it often comes down to the “lesser evil” when given only a few options.

It’s also a bad look for things that are obviously imported. You see ‘prepared in Canada’ for something like orange juice and immediately lose all credibility with the customer standing in the aisle thinking their being duped.

I don’t think we’re talking about imported products that are being mislabelled. We’re talking about products that may (or may not) use imported ingredients to make the finished product.

Again, many of those items could very well be Made in Canada (by legal definition), so it would suck to have to avoid those, and hurt Canadian workers at the same time, if there were to be no labelling at all.

At the end of the day, as long as consumers are aware of what the label means, and those labels are used appropriately, I see no problem with it.

In an ideal world, product labels would be far more expansive and specific than what they are now. Perhaps the Buy Canadian movement will impact future labelling standards. 🤞

That’s my opinion, anyway.