Yeah love that you mentioned T&T. It’s more Chinese rather than Korean focused though. I think they really cleaned things up when Loblaws bought them. They’ve got some really nice stores (clean, spacious and well-lit) in Markham.
Whether intentional or not, I think 12 unit select was one of the design choices that enabled the pros and experts to really separate themselves from the average folks.
This is certainly location-dependent. I just went through an apartment search in San Francisco where one of my requirements was electric car charging. Yes of course SF is tech-forward, but most buildings are fifty years or older which makes installation of a charger non-trivial. I just signed a lease for an apartment that doesn’t have a car charger, but the property manager added an amendment which stipulated that one will be installed in a few months, otherwise I’m free to break from the lease. I’d say about half of the property managers I talked to across about 15 tours were amenable to it.
The points about education really resonate with me. In my engineering undergrad, it was frustrating to see in our applied math courses that the mechanical plugging and chugging of equations was the approach that most of my peers took in their studies. They got better grades than me. I wanted to understand concepts more deeply, but there was no time, and the tests rewarded those who could simply go through the motions of applying formulae to problems.