My sources tell me the beloved "Ice... Cold ... Beer" vendor at the Rogers Centre Blue Jays games has been unceremoniously fired from his position, ostensibly for not following the policy of ID'ing anyone who "appears under 30." Interesting policy. Pretty wide cushion they leave between 30 and the legal drinking age. CTV News has more on the story. The Globe and Mail has an article, too.
What's the real story? Since the firing was likely based on a pretext for other reasons, I can only assume that this "character" (who truly livens up games, to the delight of fans and out-of-town visitors alike) wasn't to the liking of some officious twit who works for the food services company.
In the mind of anyone who thinks twice at shelling out $50 for a simple baseball game or for that matter, $9 for a Budweiser Tall Boy, is that the characters make it. It's the characters that keep you coming back. The forces that conspire to vacuum out every scrap of personality in any consumer experience seem to want to turn us all into automatons.
Aramark, bring back the Ice Cold Beer guy, or fire all of the rest of your staff, to be consistent. They don't always ID everybody who "appears under 30," and most of them frankly have way too much personality for your tastes, too.
From the standpoint of any consumer experience you can name - homogenized mediocrity sucks. Who *are* these people who think they're doing the world a favor by taking all the fun out if it?
