Business in Winnipeg

[EndoftheBeginning]

Assiniboine Credit Union plans to merge with Entegra pending shareholders approving by a vote in late July-early August. Will maintain the ACU name.

[buzzg]

Sounds like more of an acquisition to me lol

[bomberjet]

I wonder how many different credit unions have been swallowed up over the years. Been a lot of smaller credit unions who have "merged".

[cllew]

And its been Assiniboine Credit Union doing most of the merging to become the number one CU in Manitoba.

[ywgwalk]

Flying under the radar, but an acquisition announced this week by Richardson International to gain wheat milling in St. Louis and a few elevators/crop inputs locations in North Dakota.

https://www.agcanada.com/daily/richa...urum-processor

Agrifood firm Richardson International is set to expand and further diversify its grain processing space with a deal for what’s billed as North America’s single largest durum flour and semolina miller.

The Winnipeg company said Thursday it will buy 100 per cent of the shares in Italgrani USA Inc., whose assets include a mill, elevator and Mississippi River barge-loading facility at St. Louis; three grain elevators in northwestern North Dakota; and a commodity trading desk in Minneapolis.

[YWG-RO]

That’s their way, stealthy. The company and family are truly class acts.

[Ando]

Winnipeg has been named again as one of the seven intelligent communities. There is also an FP article that mentions North Forge as being a big part of the calculation

https://www.intelligentcommunity.org...press_releases

[GreyGarden]

Saw that the downtown BIZ released this report on downtown and the pandemic. It's what most of us knew, but now we have the numbers.

The report: https://downtownwinnipegbiz.com/wp-c...21-low-res.pdf

Link to survey: https://downtownwinnipegbiz.com/news...own-july-2021/

I thought the stats on living downtown (page 7) and downtown construction (page 9) to be the most interesting.

The report also contains some nice recent pictures of the City.

[wags_in_the_peg]

it's a sad state, I drive through it 2x a day. except for around RBC CC, streets are baron except for the shopping cart pushers and corner sign holders. I've heard from friends that IG has sent return to office is Jan '22 and 3 separate department of Feds all said Spring '22. that's lots of people who ate lunch 2-5 x's a week still a long ways away from returning.

[ywgwalk]

Meanwhile in the evenings and weekends the exchange is packed to the gills.

[EdwardTH]

Downtown needs actual residents a whole lot more than it needs people driving in and going out for lunch once a week. It's encouraging that there are at least a half dozen significant rental projects underway in the downtown/exchange right now. Keep em coming and make downtown a go-to spot for students and young people who don't wanna have to drive everywhere. Once the theatres, bars and concert venues are up and running again they'll have a reason to want to be there. This is Winnipeg, the 9-5 commuter crowd wasn't exactly lining up to buy downtown condos near their office before covid, no need to pander just to them in the recovery.

[pspeid]

Originally Posted by EdwardTH

Downtown needs actual residents a whole lot more than it needs people driving in and going out for lunch once a week.

Exactly! Even if some of those residents are "working from home", they are doing it downtown, and still using downtown businesses at times.

[thebasketballgeek]

One thing about the report is that it seemed to apply negative connotations to working from home. I’m sure now after this 17 month experience of working from home there should hopefully be a higher aptitude to employees who don’t come in 5 days a week rather they come in 2/3x a week and the other days just work from home. Who knows maybe people might line up their days of working at the office when there’s an event in downtown like a Jets game or concert which might actually make the individual spend more $ then usual in the downtown area.

Also, Winnipeg was slowly starting to have major traffic issues before the pandemic hit and this is a great way to keep cars off the road and slightly reduce GHG emissions.

I think everyone here knows the main catalyst to drive growth in downtown and I’m glad most comments agree with the sentiment that it’s ESSENTIAL to increase the permanent downtown population and do it rapidly. In fact, if companies deem that they don’t need that extra office space because of the increase in WFH then start transitioning purely office buildings to mix use through renovation or redevelopment. We still have all those damn parking lots to redevelop.

I mean 16,000 people isn’t nearly enough, and I wonder what could be the catalyst for the rapid growth needed to make our downtown thrive. Affordable housing? relaxed zoning laws? improving public perception? Politicians actually listening to City Planners? Either way it’s definitely a huge undertaking and I’m very curious to see the direction our downtown is headed in the near future, hopefully a very positive direction.

[EdwardTH]

Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek

I’m sure now after this 17 month experience of working from home there should hopefully be a higher aptitude to employees who don’t come in 5 days a week rather they come in 2/3x a week and the other days just work from home. Who knows maybe people might line up their days of working at the office when there’s an event in downtown like a Jets game or concert which might actually make the individual spend more $ then usual in the downtown area.

I kinda think this will be true. The one or two days that people actually make the trip downtown to the office will be more of an event, you'll be more likely to go for lunch with your coworkers, etc. Make it worth the trip. Before it was just the daily drudgery of surviving your commute in and out. Now the days you go in to the office will feel like an occasion.

[The Unknown Poster]

The company I work for (large, national) has told us we've actually made large improvements since working from home. All stats across the board are better. "You guys are way better workers from home", absences are way down. Morale is way up.

[cheswick]

Originally Posted by The Unknown Poster

The company I work for (large, national) has told us we've actually made large improvements since working from home. All stats across the board are better. "You guys are way better workers from home", absences are way down. Morale is way up.

There's a poll that goes out in my company every so often that asks about thoughts on work from home. A lot of the complaining is the blurring of the lines between work time and off time and less work life balance. Personally I find far more weekend emails going out. Got an email from my boss friday night once asking for something to be done by monday morning. That would never have happened when we were working in the office.

So I personally wonder if increased productivity could be in part due to increased work hours.

[wags_in_the_peg]

increased work hours or irregular work hours? i find some of my team members are still working same amount of hrs, but now that it's so easy to connect back to office, they might start work at 6am instead of 8am, or they are working 3 hrs on a sat am but they Friday they only work 5 hrs.

[Ando]

Originally Posted by cheswick

There's a poll that goes out in my company every so often that asks about thoughts on work from home. A lot of the complaining is the blurring of the lines between work time and off time and less work life balance. Personally I find far more weekend emails going out. Got an email from my boss friday night once asking for something to be done by monday morning. That would never have happened when we were working in the office.

So I personally wonder if increased productivity could be in part due to increased work hours.

No question that is the case. Heard lots of evidence the invasion of work into home time is happening.

[buzzg]

Know of a lot of companies going to flex time or a "core work hours" model. The core model goes something like you must be "on" from 10-3, but the other 3 hours you can work whenever the hell you want as long as work gets done. Essentially, be available for meetings mid-day, get your solo work done when you want. Obviously this depends on the type of work you do.

--

In regards to downtown – I have a friend who just moved into Fort Garry Place who I never would have thought would move downtown. Always lived central, but when looking for a new place he said it's the "perfect" location. It's in arguably the nicest part of downtown (Bro-Ass) to live, minutes walk from the Forks, Osborne, Exchange – St. B, Corydon, Wolesley not much further. He works at U of M so he's thrilled the BLUE Line comes almost right outside his door and gets him there in 20 minutes. There's a grocery store and convenience store in his building, not to mention all the other shops nearby.

All in all he's thrilled, and wasn't really considering living downtown when looking.

[esquire]

I'm more pessimistic than ever about the state of downtown. What will end up happening is that once events return and workers start returning in significant numbers the professional boosters will cheer and claim that the problem is over, but we know it won't be that easy. Covid has pretty well killed any sort of large-scale downtown retail... all that's left beyond Giant Tiger is niche boutiques. Losing all of those 9-5 workers has clearly taken a huge toll on downtown business that were probably just hanging in there before this all went down, and I doubt those types of retailers will reopen once the workers are back.

When he was mayor, Glen Murray used to say that downtown shapes the image that visitors have of the city. And the image that downtown presents now is bad. No one is going to walk or drive down Portage and be impressed with what they see.

The usual retort to this is "well, it'll be OK once we get more people living downtown". But how do you change the situation when you're building maybe one significant residential building every couple of years? People weren't exactly clamoring to live downtown before covid and I don't see what has changed since then that will cause them to flock downtown. I think the situation is becoming dire but I suppose it will take a bit of time for that reality to set in.