I think most people who are not in this group would expect it to be private. My snail mail isn't encrypted, but I have an expectation that it is private.
I'm a Star Wars collector and parent who shops at TRU. Beyond debt, the stores are mismanaged the same as most other old-school retailers that are having problems.
For the last Force Friday (the day all the stores get new Star Wars toys and people go out at midnight to purchase), there were numerous reports of TRU's opening at midnight with almost zero new inventory. How does that happen, it's a planned date set months in advance. My TRU also has $200 items that have sat on the shelves for over 2 years.
But, aren't ecommerce sites collecting this information and more from your browsing? I don't think it's possible to say one is much better than the other, just that we expect tracking online, not in the real world.
I think a lot of the Bay Area power comes from having so many tech folks in one place, which is hard for Canada to manage anywhere given population. In the Bay Area, you can go for a coffee or a beer and run into a bunch of tech folks and something may come out of that. There's no where in Canada where tech has the density to make that happen in a random way (maybe Ottawa or Waterloo back in the day).
Immigration can help, for sure bringing smart minds in is never a bad thing. I've only lived in Ottawa and Toronto, I think creating the critical mass of tech folks is difficult in those cities which have other more dominant industries (government and financial/cpg respectively).
Agree that past success fuels the mentality that builds the future.