Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for April 16th, 2009

Seems the new big craze in getting consumers to  use your product is to claim you are Green or you are Eco-Friendly. 

Two days ago I splurged and got a car wash for one of my cars (since I usually don’t do it and hadn’t done it since last fall). The Sunoco I went to boasted that this car wash was Eco-Friendly, although I didn’t see the exact claims about how it could make that claim (my assumption is that they reuse the water and filter it in some fashion or another). The actual car wash was quite good and my car does not look grungy any more, however, something else tweaked my interest.

Near the entrance of the car wash there were boasts about if you wash your car in your driveway you are NOT being ecologically friendly (I am assuming the eco in eco-friendly is Ecology and not Economy) because you are washing tar, road salt, oil, grease and other yucky things into the sewers which is then flushed into nature (in Ottawa we have filtration plants (which sometimes flush raw sewage into the river, but not always, but that is another story)). The implication was that by using this eco-friendly car wash, you were saving the environment.

That was an interesting argument, that I had to think about a little, before I went, “What a load of horse defecation!“. With that same argument I should take all my clothes to the dry cleaners since I am flushing all the crap on my clothes into the sewers as well, and I shouldn’t wash my dishes, since that does the same, or take showers, or flush my toilet.

So if I didn’t wash anything, would I then be the ultimate Eco-Friendly human? Rhetorical, but an interesting question.

CPI Friday

The Canadian CPI numbers should be out on Friday however our brothers south of the border have an interesting set of numbers already.  The states actually saw a CPI drop of 0.1% February to March which is the first time that has happened in 54 years. Gas price drop seems to be the main reason for this drop, but it is very interesting to hear about, we shall see what our numbers have to hold for tomorrow.