Brandon, MB

City Loop Trail

Run Time: 65:22 + 2-minute kick

Brandon is a pleasant small city. The night before I stayed in downtown Winnipeg, which was not pleasant. I was on the 10th floor of the Holiday Inn Express, which felt relatively safe, compared to the lobby, but when I got in the elevator to go get some McDonald’s, a woman asked me if I was traveling with my wife. I answered, “Yes!” I am pretty sure she was a prostitute. Sorry, not trying to profile anyone. It was just a hunch.

Doing business with our Canadian distributors is currently difficult, because they are paying a 25% tariff on much of what we sell, a reciprocal tariff to counter our tariff on Canadian imports. We are the best source for what they need to sell, but we also increased our prices in June to cover the added costs of all the tariffs we are now paying to import items and components, including a lot of stuff from China. That’s a double whammy for our Canadian distributors.

All of this tariff BS is a legitimate killer for business, especially anything that imports items for resale or components for manufacturing. If it is helping the economy in any way, it’s a mystery to me how that is happening. We are not going to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. I know I’m not the only one who knows this. We cannot afford to pay what it costs to make something in the U.S. from scratch, and we don’t have the infrastructure to do it.

The world is the way we designed it. We are the consumers. We off-shored manufacturing so that we could buy more. The jobs that were lost to off-shore manufacturing were not sustainable. Tariffs are not the answer to anything other than how can we fuck everything up in the name of shock politics?

It was actually kind of nice to find a few kindred spirits to talk to about the horrendous joke we have played upon ourselves by electing this clown. I normally avoid discussing politics with customers, but some of my Canadian customers align with my views quite well, and I want them to know that not all U.S. citizens are toxically self-destructive.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of last week were three of the eight lowest sales booking days of the year so far for my sales region. That is not an anomaly. That is scary. That is look-for-a-life-boat numbers. There is no reason to think it is going to get much better. The industry we serve already wasn’t doing well before all of this nonsense. End users will just move to something else rather than continue to spend money on what they need to keep their current business afloat.

Pardon me if my faith in humanity is lacking. As I’ve written before, I eschew belief in favor of evidence. It makes no sense to me to have faith in humanity. The evidence I have seen shows me that the powerful are seeking to increase their power, and worse yet, the systems are doing that all on their own, almost like machine learning systems figure out how to do something better. I think we’ve lost control. And that’s why, I think, we are seeing more civil disobedience and violent protest. It might be the appropriate response.

As of today, I have a job. I am confident of the value of what I do. However, the pattern of last week’s bookings is not sustainable. I am pretty clever at pivoting my sales tactics and focus, but I’m not sure I can produce miracles.

But it sure was beautiful in Brandon.