Double Dutch brainwaves

Well you have to hand it to the Dutch. The Euro Zone may be in the tank, but they not only keep producing the world’s tallest people, and the world’s best cheese, they also keep coming up with the best ideas. Here’s a couple I’ve read about recently.

The first idea is the “Repair Café.” Why not, thought enterprising Dutch mother Martine Postma, try to fix consumer appliances that break, instead of just junking them for landfill? Why not offer an environment instead in which you can drop your item off, and have a coffee while someone fixes it? The Repair Café Foundation has raised over $500,000 from government, foundations and individuals to pay for staffing and marketing of the cafés, which are not designed to drive paid repair people out of business but to make the hitherto not-worth-fixing, worth-fixing.

The idea has grown into a group of 30 such cafés in the Netherlands alone, and inquiries have poured in from all over the world. They’ve already started a repair collective in Seattle, where they specialize in kitchen mixers, laptops and espresso makers (it had to be Seattle). In Toronto, they already have a bike fixing cooperative.

Behind the idea, of course, is the fact that basic fix-it skills are being lost, or that the way items are made discourages the application of such skills. And there is a strong element of community building, where older teaches and bonds with younger.

The second great Dutch idea is the “Divorce Hotel.” Check in (to separate rooms) on a Friday, and leave all ready for the judge to sign off on your divorce settlement, with the help of in-house lawyers and mediators, by Sunday. A 33-year-old entrepreneur has struck agreements with six hotels in the Netherlands and is negotiating for more in the United States and Europe. The idea is to compress the divorce process and make it simpler and cheaper. Hotel staff are expressly instructed to avoid the usual bonhomie. “You don’t want the hotel crew wishing you a very nice weeked and hoping you have lots of fun here,” he states dryly.

The entrepeneur notes that just one out of every three applicant couples is accepted into the weekend program: if the couple bickers or barely speaks, or if greed or vengeance is a motive, then they won’t qualify. And somehow, this point does not surprise me: he has also negotiated a reality TV show built around the hotel concept. The U.S. producer says the audience could be big because “divorce TV is as huge as it gets…if there’s a conflict, it’s real because the stakes are real.”

Now this is all something we might be well advised to pay attention to. With wind turbines scheduled to be approved for the County any day now, and with the Globe and Mail reminding us how fickle the Toronto jet set can be, who’s to say that the County’s downgraded natural beauty won’t cause tourist visits to drop like a stone? What’s the fallback plan to attract people to our hotels and restaurants? Well, when you’re busy spending the weekend getting a divorce, maybe you don’t care that much about getting out and around, or how suspicious the locals might be. Maybe you’d sooner spend your time at your hotel getting your divorce over and done with. Maybe, because you’re now going to need two of everything, you’d relish the opportunity to take that broken toaster or waffle iron to a repair diner. Maybe the County could start to specialize in repairing wine paraphernalia, and maybe— if the original reality show is ordinarily spoken for—it could become the home court for a reality show on divorcing oenophiles. The synergies leap from the page.

Perhaps it would be a good idea for the County to get out in front of this one before our natural competitors—places like Sarnia and Sudbury—grab the initiative from us. All the same, I’d sooner see a quickie divorce between wind turbines and the County.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.