The summer’s hottest pop-up is at grandma’s house
Estate sales have become a major attraction for deal-hunters.
Good afternoon, and welcome back to Milk Bag.
On Friday afternoon, I was staring at a blank calendar for the first time in a while and decided to embrace the age-old advice of acting like a tourist in your own city. I admire people for whom this is their default mode, because the results exceeded expectations: after lighting up some group chats, we ended up at a picnic on the Toronto Islands, watching tennis at Sobeys Stadium, and running the length of Tommy Thompson Park, with some stops in east-end coffee shops and saunas in between. With a little less than a month of true summer left, it's very important not to let a weekend go to waste.
Big Idea: Selling grandma’s stuff has become a major attraction
Skim This: Kevin O’Leary has scaled down his data centre plans
Open Tabs: A Toronto salon is offering blowout classes for $150
The summer’s hottest pop-up is at grandma’s house
After more than a decade of running estate sales across Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, there isn’t much Mona (last name withheld), the founder of Castle Content Sales, hasn’t sold: crystal chandeliers, fine art, and cars right out of the driveway. An upcoming sale in Forest Hill features a sofa from Brunschwig & Fils, an antique Aubusson rug, and fine china by Noritake. At another one in Rosedale, antique ship equipment will be among the items up for grabs. “You can’t find this stuff at Winners or HomeSense,” she says. “We sell everything you can possibly find in a house, and you never know what you’re going to get.”
The popularity of estate sales on social media is pushing this once-niche corner of secondhand shopping into the mainstream. Architectural Digest reports the hashtag #estatesale has now clocked up 675,000 posts on Instagram and 153,000 TikTok videos. What used to offer a quick way to offload a large amount of items in the event of a downsizing, death, or divorce—usually to collectors, neighbours, or others on a need-to-know basis—has become something of a sport. When a sale is live, Mona says thousands of people can be browsing her website at any given time (in Canada, many popular sellers only list online).
Milk Bag readers already know that resale is booming, but this fresh injection of stuff onto the market is driven by the demographics of an aging population, particularly its motivation to downsize. And we're early, too. While there are thousands of companies conducting estate sales across North America, there are no more than a couple dozen that come up in a quick Google search across the GTA. In the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reports that estate sale shopping has turned into a “full-contact sport,” but the same isn't as common here (at least not yet) and there are still deals to be found.
Further reading:
—The Full-Contact Sport of Estate-Sale Shopping (WSJ)
—How Influencers Are Rewriting the Rules of Estate Sales (AD)
The Milken Institute is planning a conference at Toronto’s Park Hyatt on September 14. The event will take advantage of the investors, pension leaders, execs and policy-makers in town for the Canada Investment Summit.
Kevin O’Leary says he messed up messaging around plans to build a massive Utah data centre, and has scaled down the project by half. Across the U.S., people are pushing back against data centres over noise and water and energy use.
Meta is trying to solve the same problem with a $1 billion giveaway targeted at communities close to where the company operates data centres. It’s not yet clear who it will help, or over what period the money will be spent.
Amazon is building a $200 million fulfillment centre in Nova Scotia, adding to a Canadian logistics network that includes nearly 70 fulfillment centres, sortation centres and delivery stations across B.C., Alberta and Ontario.
Jamieson Wellness, Canada’s largest vitamin and supplement brand, is selling to Kirin, a major player in the Japanese beer market, for $2.5 billion. Kirin is buying up companies in an attempt to pivot into the wellness sector.
PRIVATE EQUITY BOYFRIENDS
“If you live in the celebrity bubble, party after party, with the same people—the same 25 people—life gets really boring,” Kevin O’Leary told The Wall Street Journal. “When you end up with a private-equity guy, your life gets far more interesting.” (The Hottest Arm Candy Is a Private Equity Boyfriend)
The Globe and Mail is hiring an editor for a new Intelligence Unit. Not many people get the chance to build new things in Canadian media (why I’m so grateful to The Peak), which makes this a very cool opportunity. What is unclear is what the offering will be—it will likely be this person’s job to figure out, but it sounds like a mix of reporting and events—and whether existing subscribers will be able to access it. They could be introducing an entirely new coverage tier, like The Logic Professional (launched this year), or The Economist’s Intelligence Unit.
Sorry to everyone who was not invited to Drake’s women appreciation party at Casa Loma last week, or Jamie Salter’s padel party in Muskoka last weekend.
Mark Zuckerberg is the latest tech excec to write an AI essay. The blog post recycles lines from an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal last month, which makes an argument that AI can benefit everyone, but only if we break down the “extreme” concentration of power currently held by a few firms with the most powerful models. This is an easy argument to make when your company does not have one of these top models, but at the same time, those who say their models are “too powerful” to make widely accessible are struggling to contain them.
I really wanted to let you all know where Mark Carney decided to go on vacation in Italy, but his plane tracker was taken offline. My bets are on Sardinia or Sicily.
Goodfood’s bankruptcy can’t be good for the future of meal delivery. I think people are turning away from meal delivery as prices inch into take-out territory without being tastier or much healthier. In 2019, Goodfood controlled over 40% of the Canadian market and had doubled its annual revenue to $161 million, but made a bet to the tune of $45 million or so on rapid grocery delivery, which didn’t pan out as the cost of food and labour rose. What I have seen a lot of recently is local chefs offering weekly meal prep, which I would be very interested in.
Palm Sunday launched blowout classes for $150. Do not underestimate the power of great hair on your personal and professional prospects, as my friend Isabel Slone touched on in a lovely piece about her experience.
Netflix has started casting for the first season of Love is Blind Canada.
Range Rover hosted a brand trip on Lake Joe last weekend. Muskoka trips are officially on brands’ summer calendars: Prime Canada hosted a trip the week before, and Peroni had a group up earlier this summer. This particular cottage is available for the same weekend next year for $27,789 through Jayne’s Cottages.
A Robb Report article about the obsession with longevity found people’s fixation on living longer can worsen their biomarkers. For what it’s worth, I recently decided to ‘improve’ my own health by downloading a fitness tracking apps and after four weeks, every measure has worsened, probably because it has removed any enjoyment and introduced new stresses around eating and exercise. And that’s the end of that.
How did you know that I was looking for the right place to manage an estate sale, rent out a cottage and not feel guilty about my on-again-off-again longevity strategies!?