I've been doing the same in Vancouver. We have a fairly well-attended monthly meetup group here
http://www.meetup.com/bitcoinvan/ and a good number of people offering to exchange bitcoins through localbitcoins.com.
Last week I was in a cafe/restaurant by my house that had a notice up saying they were no longer accepting VISA/Mastercard for purchases under $20 due to a recent increase in the transaction fees. I pitched bitcoins to the owner and they've agreed to accept them starting tomorrow! I'm going to set them up with a Point of Sale app that I've been working on that runs nicely on cheap 7" Android tablets:
http://vanbtc.ca/sweettoothI've offered to purchase all the bitcoins they receive at whatever the exchange rate was at the time of sale. I'm putting together a simple report that logs all the transactions they receive and totals up the equivalent in CAD so they can know how much I owe them:
http://vanbtc.ca/sweettooth/reportI'm trying to design this app so that other people can setup customized Point of Sale pages and offer to act as exchanges for their local merchants. The code is at
https://github.com/asoltys/bitcoin_pos and you can see the configuration page at
http://vanbtc.ca/I'm still working out some kinks and want to add some sort of authentication mechanism in to prevent people from logging fake transactions or exchange rates but I'll have it ready soon and will announce it officially in the coming weeks.