Chipotle customers who joined the chain’s temporary loyalty program — a program aimed at winning back customers after a spate of food-borne illness outbreaks at its restaurants — are finally getting a reward, in the form of free catered food.
About 85,000 Chiptopia members who completed the program’s top tier of requirements will get free catering for 20 people at a value of $240, which shakes out to about $20.4 million, company spokesman Chris Arnold told CNBC.
Chiptopia’s three levels — mild, medium, and hot — rewarded customers who visited the restaurant since June. To get to “hot” status folks had to buy 11 or more entrees every month for all three summer months. They earned nine free meals already for hitting that tier, so the free catering is just the guacamole on the burrito (this time, it doesn’t cost extra).
They sound pretty hungry after all that hard work:
Killian hit Hot Status at Chipotle all 3 months so he gets free catering from them for 10 people what a champ
CNCBC notes that Chiptopia is paying off for the company, the chain said in July, and it’s now planning another loyalty program. It’s unclear if it would be a permanent thing or another limited-time promotion.
Best Buy isn’t the only retailer looking to work with hot new startups, Target was just a bit more quiet about the whole thing. Last week the big box retailer stealthily launched a website aimed at collecting ideas from startups interested in working with the company.
The website solicits pitches from early-stage companies that are looking to run pilot programs that would enhance customers’ experiences with the retailer, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
Unlike Best Buy’s recently announced plans that would put new products on shelves, Target’s “Pitch to Pilot” initiative isn’t a way for companies to hawk product ideas, but instead to provide insight on services the retailer could one day offer in stores or online.
Pitch to Pilot is Target’s way of dealing with an influx of information from startups, that are apparently dying to work with the retailer ever since it launched its Techstars accelerator program last year.
That program, which recently graduated its first class of 11 startups — has received interest from more than 500 tech-based startups with ideas about how to impact retail—from supply chain to data analytics to new ways to integrate digital and in-store experiences.
“A lot of it was people reaching out over email or through LinkedIn or if they knew somebody at Target,” a spokesperson tells the Tribune. “And you never know if you’re reaching out to the right person.”
Target’s new website — startup.target.com — will formalize the process for these companies, as they will fill out a pitch form. Target claims it will respond within 30 days.
Nearly 80,000 former CCI students are facing some type of debt collection related to the loans they took out to attend the schools, despite the Department of Education’s ability to provide defense of repayment discharges — a process that would wipe away the debt based on the company’s alleged fraudulent actions.
This debt relief delay is unacceptable, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) wrote in a letter [PDF] to Secretary of Education John King, urging him to immediately provide relief for students of the now-defunct schools.
The road to obtaining discharges has been mired with issues, most stemming from the fact that the process has seldom ever been used, and certainly never to the extend it is needed for CCI students.
According to the Dept. of Education, under the law, students may be eligible for loan forgiveness of any federal Direct Loans taken out to attend a school if that school committed fraud by doing something or failing to do something, or otherwise violated applicable state law related to the loans or the educational services paid for.
While numerous investigations from federal prosecutors, attorneys general, and agencies have found evidence of fraud by CCI — such as using inflated job placement rates and pushing students into high cost loans — and the Dept. previously announced that it would “fast track” relief by using findings from a joint investigation with state attorneys general to expedite the CCI claim process, only about 4,000 of the 23,000 students who filed claims have been unable to receive the discharges they are entitled to.
Instead, the majority of former students — even those who have applied for relief — continue to send monthly payments to the Dept. of Education, Warren writes.
“It is unconscionable that instead of helping these borrowers, vast numbers of Corinthian victims are currently being hounded by the department’s debt collectors — many having their credit slammed, their tax refunds seized, their Social Security and Earned Income Tax Credit payments reduced, or wages garnished — all to pay fraudulent debts,” Warren wrote in the letter.
The report compiled by Warren’s staff, and based on data from the Dept. of Education, found that there are 79,717 people who are eligible to apply for loan forgiveness, but are instead dealing with debt collectors.
Of those borrowers, 30,000 have had tax refunds, tax credits, and other benefits seized, while 4,000 have had their wages garnished.
During a press conference on Thursday, reported by the Washington Post, King addressed Warren’s letter, noting that many of the borrowers she references aren’t eligible for discharges.
“Some are eligible if they seek to apply for closed-school discharge or borrower defense, others would not be. It’s worth pointing out that some of those students attended programs where there were findings of fraud, others did not,” King said.
In addition to King’s statement, the Post reports that Education under secretary Ted Mitchell released a statement saying that the Dept. has conducted “ongoing, extensive direct outreach” to former students who may be eligible for debt relief.
He also noted that the Dept. of Education will conduct a “targeted effort to reach Corinthian borrowers who have loans in collections or subject to Treasury tax offsets or wage garnishment” this fall.
Questions about the Department’s use of the defense of repayment rule and continued collection of debts from potentially eligible students comes a day after a former Everest University student used the Education Dept. and Department of Treasury for seizing his tax refund, the Post reports.
The man claims that the funds were seized despite action from the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office that included submitting a group defense claim that detailed CCI’s fraudulent actions against students, including the plaintiff.
If you’re the kind of person who visits New York City just for the sandwiches, you’ll probably want to pay attention: the famed Carnegie Deli announced it’ll be closing its flagship location by the end of the year.
The midtown restaurant’s owner told staff today that she’s keeping the deli open through Dec. 31 so workers can make good money through the holidays, but the delicatessen will shut its doors after that, ABC 7 reports.
“Moving forward, Marian Harper hopes to keep her father’s legacy alive by focusing on licensing the iconic Carnegie Deli brand and selling their world-famous products for wholesale distribution,” a spokeswoman said.
The family has owned the deli since 1976. It first opened in midtown Manhattan in 1937. In 2015 it shut down for nine months over an illegal gas hookup, opening its doors again last February.
There’s still hope for pastrami lovers, however: the flagship location could reopen under new management. In the meantime, there are licensed Carnegie Deli locations in Las Vegas; Bethlehem, PA; NYC’s Madison Square Garden; and at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens.
Every awards season, the internet fills up with pristine, pirated copies of Oscar-contending movies, many of them ripped from screeners sent out by the studios to promote the films. One staffer on the Dr. Phil Show who has admitted to leaking a copy of The Revenant online was recently sentenced to fork over $1.12 million to the studio.
Prosecutors say the man, using the screen name “clutchit,” uploaded a digital copy of the movie to the torrent-tracking site Pass The Popcorn on Dec. 19, 2015 — nearly a week before the film hit U.S. theaters.
TorrentFreak reports that an FBI investigation ensued, eventually identifying the uploader as a 31-year-old California man in the TV industry whose account had also apparently been used to leak a copy of The Peanuts Movie, which we didn’t see but we’re pretty sure doesn’t include a scene of Linus being mauled by a bear.
In Feb. 2016, two days before The Revenant‘s Best Picture hopes were slammed against a tree by Spotlight, the Department of Justice accused clutchit of felony copyright infringement for uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for distribution. Clutchit was fired from his gig on the pop psychology talk show as a result of this allegation.
The form entered a guilty plea to this charge on March 31, as part of a deal with prosecutors. The question is: How much should he be punished?
He could have been sentenced to between 21 to 27 months behind bars, based on the calculated level of the offense, but prosecutors eventually recommended a total of 12 months in custody. Earlier this month, clutchit’s attorneys argued that there were additional reasons to reduce the possible prison time, including the defendant’s family obligations. His wife has been out of work since 2013 and she must care for four young children. Making matters worse, claimed the court documents, clutchit will likely never be able to find another job in the entertainment industry because of his crime, meaning he’d have to embark on an entirely new career path.
In the end, the court came down this week with a sentence that was light on confinement, but heavy on financial penalty. The uploader must do eight months of home detention (during which time he’ll probably watch The Revenant on HBO a few thousand times), followed by two years of probation.
The big bill will come from Twentieth Century Fox, to which clutchit owes $1.12 million. That is a lot to you and me — and to the defendant, who was making around $40,000 a year according to court documents — but it’s only about .6% of the studio’s $183 million domestic box office revenue from the movie, and about .2% of its global ticket sales (not to mention pay-TV and home video licensing fees).
Sears had a deal with the Holly Hill Mall in Burlington, NC that isn’t unusual: the retailer gave the mall a small percentage of its sales instead of paying a fixed rent. That amount has evidently fallen over the years as the popularity and business prospects of Sears fell, and now the mall has sued Sears for failing to keep up its end of the lease.
The Times-News reports that Sears has been part of that mall for about 40 years, and it last signed a new lease in 2013. That lease spelled out that the retailer had to pay 2% of its net sales, and provide the mall with monthly sales reports.
According to a lawsuit that the mall filed, Sears failed to file those reports for some of the months between either 2010 or 2014 and this year, and that the department store chain also hasn’t been promoting its business enough to justify a net-sales rent agreement.
The mall seeks a $25,000 settlement, and to kick Sears out so it can rent that 65,000 square feet to another tenant.
Meanwhile, the Times-News reports, business is just great at the Kmart down the street, since the store announced its going out of business sale. The parent company of both Sears and Kmart, Sears Holdings, owns that building, but a company spokesman wouldn’t say whether the company plans to just move the Sears store to that building.
It’s pretty unlikely, though: renting or selling the building would most likely make the company more money than moving the Sears. The existence of the lawsuit shows that the store probably isn’t a high-performing location to begin with.
When you hear the name “Teddy Ruxpin,” perhaps you’re hit with a wave of nostalgia tinged with a lingering wariness of the animatronic talking teddy bear that read stories off a cassette tape shoved in his back. But now that there’s a new Teddy Ruxpin on the scene with bright blue, lidlessly blinking LCD eyes, your nightmares may have a new face.
The Teddy Ruxpin update comes from a company called Wicked Cool Toys, and is the fifth version of the bear that was first introduced in 1985, Gizmodo reports.
Instead of jamming a cassette tape in the toy’s back, there’s 4 GB of onboard storage that can hold about 40 stories at once. And of course, this being the internet of things era, he can wirelessly connect to a free accompanying app via Bluetooth to download new content and let kids read along with an interactive book.
And then there are those eyes…
While the original Teddy Ruxpin’s lidded eyes and moving mouth might have creeped you out a little bit as a kid, there’s something about this iteration that has some among the Consumerist staff reduced to whimpering puddles of fear.
AT&T offers GigaPower subscribers in several cities two options: pay $70 for your connection and get your data snooped on, or keep your privacy and pay $99. The company has regularly defended the program from critics, and claimed that it’s basically the wave of the future. And yet today, seemingly out of nowhere, A&T has suddenly announced that it will be dropping the option nationwide, and charging all consumers the same — lower — price.
Ars Technica reports today that AT&T has confirmed it is, indeed, scrapping the program.
We have to admit, we’re pretty surprised — in a good way, to be sure. As recently as yesterday we were writing stories about AT&T executives lamenting the uneven playing field if they are not allowed to do as they like with your data.
The company first launched Internet Preferences in 2013. When it brought GigaPower service to the area, it told customers they could get service for as little as $70 per month — if subscribers let AT&T snoop on their internet use history and sell that data for targeted advertising. Customers who opted to keep their private data private were charged $99, about 40% more.
AT&T continued to offer Internet Preferences as it expanded GigaPower to new cities through 2014, 2015, and this year. Although charging an extra $30 per month for privacy is basically as literal and clear an example of pay-for-privacy as you could come up with, AT&T has always objected to that framing, instead saying that the lowered price in return for data was a “benefit to the consumer” and in fact opened up access by dropping price points. (As to the counter-argument — that doing so makes privacy a luxury for higher-income subscribers only, and screws over lower-income folks — AT&T didn’t seem to have an answer.)
AT&T told Ars that it will “sunset the Internet Preferences program beginning in October,” but didn’t add much more explanation after that. We checked in with an AT&T representative, who confirmed the October deadline and that customers will drop to “the current lowest price available for their market.” That price is lower in cities with competition than in cities without, granted, but it does mean that customers who want to keep their privacy will see their bills drop sometime soon.
As to why, AT&T only said that it has been trying to make things “more simple for customers, and this is being done in the spirit of that.” A cynic could be forgiven, though, for wondering if it has something to do with the ISP privacy rule the FCC is considering.
That rule, if approved, would basically a set of restrictions on what data internet providers can collect, store, and share about their customers’ use of the service — similar to existing restrictions on telephone and cable companies. The rule is wildly unpopular among ISPs, which claim, among other things, that limiting their ability to charge consumers for privacy actually hurts consumers.
AT&T’s program was the first high profile pay-for-privacy scheme among ISPs. If it no longer exists, that may grease the wheels that help it avert oh-so-hated regulation.
It’s got to be hard enough working on an airplane — serving drinks thousands of feet in the sky, smiling at strangers when you maybe want to scream at them — without having to deal with uncomfortable clothing. But some American Airlines flight attendants say they’re breaking out in hives and suffering horrible headaches from their brand new uniforms.
The airline just debuted the new uniforms on Sept. 20 and already there are reports coming in that they’re causing physical discomfort among staff: Chicago Business Journal cites inside sources who say more than 400 flight attendants have informed their union and company management that they’re itchy and breaking out into hives, and experiencing headaches since they’ve put on the new uniforms.
An American spokeswoman confirmed to the Journal that the airline has gotten some complaints about the uniforms, which are believed to be related to a wool allergy.
She said anyone feeling uncomfortable in the uniforms has been given the option of getting new clothing made out of a polyester material — but some attendants say there are also issues with the garments made from cotton.
The union that represents the flight attendants is now sending the uniform out for more testing, after American management reportedly had it tested by a British product testing company.
In the meantime, people in the know say AA management asked any flight attendants having issues with itching, rashes, or headaches to file injury on duty paperwork.
Another issue with the new duds has already been addressed, at least: some female pilots didn’t like the new shirts because the fabric was a bit too see-through to be professional.
Shortly after ITT Educational Services announced it would close all of its ITT Technical campuses across the country, the Department of Education swooped in to try to placate students’ concerns by announcing that it would forgive currently or recently enrolled students’ federal student loans. While the process to wipe out that debt will no doubt be complicated and take time, former students who used veteran benefits — like the GI Bill — will likely be waiting longer and have more hurdles to jump through.
Cleveland.com reports that there were about 7,000 veterans attending ITT Tech schools when the company collapsed.
While federal student loans can be discharged through the Department of Education, any additional aid provided through the Department of Veterans Affairs is currently in limbo.
That’s because, under VA rules, once veteran education benefits are used, they’re gone, you can’t get them back. And legislation that would have changed that stipulation — at least for ITT students — failed to pass muster Wednesday evening, Cleveland.com reports.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH), would have directed the VA not to count VA funds used for ITT against a veteran’s student aid limit.
However, to do that, the VA would have to pull funds from other programs, and some legislators didn’t see that as a viable option.
“We can say that we’re authorizing the VA to pay for it, but what are they going to do?” Sen. Thom Tillis (NC) said. “We haven’t provided them with any funds to do it, so what potentially suffers as a result?”
When ITT Tech closed its doors, the Dept. of Education noted that veterans should have received a letter from the VA outlining their options.
For example, if students acted quickly to transfer to a new school, they may have preserved their remaining months of GI Bill eligibility and avoid the possibility of any break in housing allowance.
For now, any actual legislative action will be put on hold as Congress leaves for a break. Still, proponents of the bill believe it could be discussed and voted on in December.
We don’t know how Apple wronged this customer in Dijon, France, but he caught everyone’s attention when he walked calmly around a store, smashing iPhones and at least one computer with a heavy metal ball. During his smashing spree, he told employeees and shoppers about his grievances with the company, then tried to leave the store before mall security caught up with him.
This is not a recommended way to get Apple’s attention about your dispute with the company, in case you were wondering.
A local news report said that the man wore a single glove and held a hollow steel ball used for the game pétanque (the most similar thing we play in the United States is Bocce).
The total carnage was ten to twelve iPhones and one MacBook Air, and of course a bystander captured the attack on video.
The man was rather calm throughout the smash attack, even if his anger at Apple is what originally prompted it.
He then tried to leave, and seemed surprised when mall security wouldn’t let him walk away from the store.
Cord-cutting is, as we know, a real trend. It’s not what the majority of viewers do — huge numbers of consumers subscribe to cable, satellite, or fiber TV service — but it’s definitely on the rise. And one new analysis thinks the cable industry could be losing at least $1 billion a year in revenue from customers who say “so long.”
A new study, the Wall Street Journal reports, estimates that in a 12-month period, at least 800,000 subscribers are going to cancel their pay-TV service, or cut the cord.
Cord-cutting is more of a trickle than a flood, other surveys — and, for that matter, quarterly financial reports — have shown. Companies each tend to lose a few tens of thousands of viewers per quarter, but tens of millions of households still subscribe to something.
Still, those small quarterly losses for each individual company add up across the board. And analysis firm cg42, which ran the study, estimates that pay-TV companies can lose about $1,248 per cord-cutter per year.
Every subscription is different, of course, and each cord-cutter has to look at their own bill, do their own math, and decide what their content budget is going to be.
But cg42, surveying more than 1,000 U.S. customers, found that the average cord-cutter is saving more than $100 a month as compared to what they paid for cable. The average pay-TV subscribe in the study was paying about $187 before they gave up and cancelled services; after cutting the cord, that becomes a monthly average of $83. Meanwhile the “cord-nevers” — mostly younger adults who go out and form households without ever paying for TV, and so who can never cancel it — spend about $71 on the combination of broadband access and streaming services.
Do the math on those assumptions — $1,248 times 800,000 — and you do indeed come out just shy of $1 billion that the cable industry no longer gets.
“The consumer is discovering they don’t need the mean, evil cable company to get the content that they want, and they can get it for a better deal,” cg42 said. And no, live sports are not alluring enough to change anyone’s minds. 83% of the cord-cutters the company surveyed said they can get most or all of the content they want without a pay-TV subscription; for the cord-nevers, that was 87%.
Also a bad sign for cable: the longer consumers go without, the less they miss it. Especially as workarounds — like next-day viewing online, or purchasing a season of a current show from a service like Amazon or Hulu — become easier, cheaper, and more prevalent.
And yes: Netflix remains the giant elephant in the streaming room. 94% of survey respondents who don’t pay for cable said that they have Netflix subscriptions; Amazon Prime was the next-most-used paid service, hitting about half.
If you’re coming into the story late, here’s a quick catch-up: On Aug. 17, the 5-year-old was supposed to fly home on JetBlue from Cibao International Airport in the Dominican Republic to JFK International in New York City. The boy’s family had booked him an unaccompanied minor ticket for the trip, meaning JetBlue staffers were responsible for making sure he arrived safely at his destination — which, again, was supposed to be New York.
The mom says she waited at JFK for her son to arrive, only to have JetBlue present her with a child that, well… it wasn’t her son.
Thirty minutes of confusion pass, and the mom says the airline told her they had located her son and he was waiting near the baggage claim. But, once again — not her son.
According to the mom, it was another three hours until JetBlue successfully located her 5-year-old, several hundred miles, and a completely different accent, away at Boston’s Logan International.
Mother and son were eventually reunited, but in a lawsuit being filed today in a state court in Queens the mom alleges that JetBlue’s “outrageous and shocking” behavior resulted in severe emotional distress.
The complaint claims the mom “became sick and suffered… extreme fear, mental shock, mental anguish and psychological trauma.”
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, also accuses JetBlue of negligent supervision of the minor child, and negligent hiring and supervision of employees.
While the FAA has asked JetBlue to investigate how this mix-up happened, the mom’s attorney, Sanford Rubenstein, says this lawsuit will serve the purpose of providing the public an “independent inquiry” that he claims will use the “sworn testimony of JetBlue employees to shine a light on what occurred to prevent it from happening again to other children.”
Wells Fargo’s bad month has just gotten worse. The U.S. Department of Justice and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have fined the big bank $24.1 million for allegedly violating the law by repossessing military servicemembers’ cars.
Wells Fargo on Thursday agreed to pay $4.1 million to settle a Justice Department investigation and $20 million to settle allegations from the OCC that it repossessed vehicles from servicemembers without proper court orders.
Under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) a court order is required to repossess a vehicle if the servicemember took out the loan and made a payment before entering military service.
According to the DOJ settlement [PDF], from 2008 until the middle of 2015, Wells Fargo lacked that court documentation when it repossessed 413 vehicles owned by servicemembers.
The bank’s alleged actions came to light when the DOJ received a complaint in March 2015 claiming the bank had an Army National Guardsman’s used vehicle while he was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army’s Legal Assistance Program alleged that after Wells repossessed the vehicle it was sold at public auction, and then the bak attempted to collect a deficiency balance of over $10,000 from the servicemember.
A National Guard attorney asked Wells Fargo to produce the court order allowing the repossession, but says the bank failed to respond. The lawyer then contacted the DOJ, which opened an investigation into Wells’ practices.
That investigation found similar issues with servicemember vehicle repossession spanning at least seven years.
The DOJ settlement covers repossessions that occurred between Jan. 1, 2008 and July 1, 2015, and requires Wells Fargo to pay $10,000 to each of the affected servicemembers, plus any lost equity in the vehicle with interest.
In a separate, but related, order from the OCC, Wells Fargo will provide refunds and pay penalties totaling $20 million to resolve allegations it violated several aspects of SCRA.
The OCC claims in a consent order [PDF] that from 2006 to 2016, Wells Fargo violated three provisions of the SCRA, including failing to provide the 6% interest rate limit to servicemember obligations or liabilities incurred before military service, failing to accurately disclose servicemembers’ active duty status to the court prior to evicting those servicemembers, and failing to obtain court orders prior to repossessing servicemembers’ vehicles.
The OCC’s order also requires the bank to take corrective action to establish an enterprise-wide SCRA compliance program to detect and prevent future SCRA violations.
What’s that sound? It’s Google knocking on Uber and Lyft’s doors to tell them it’s come out to play: the technology giant is taking one step further into providing transportation by expanding its pilot ride-sharing program to San Francisco.
Anyone in San Francisco with a smartphone — surely, there must be a few people — can now download the Waze Rider app and request carpooled rides to and from work, The Wall Street Journal reports. Drivers on the platform use Google’s Waze navigation app.
Last May Google launched a test of the service for workers at some area employers, but Waze Rider has been slowly rolling out to San Francisco users for several weeks, Google confirmed to the WSJ.
As for how well the service works, a WSJ reporter went on a Waze Rider trip this week and said there were a few hiccups, like the app’s failure to show the rider where the driver’s car was before it arrived, and the driver had trouble using Waze’s navigation service. All told, he gave it a thumbs up.
There are some limits on the program, as Google’s goal is to make the service simply a way to connect drivers and riders headed in the same direction: drivers and riders have a two-trip daily limit as the service is intended for carpooling to and from work.
It’s also too cheap right now for drivers to make a living from the app. For example, on the reporter’s test ride, the driver — who doesn’t work for Lyft or Uber because she has a full-time job, she says — made $6.30 for the 20-minute ride, and the rider paid a special discounted price of $3.
She said she signed up to be a driver because it was “hassle-free,” and that she’ll likely do it again as an easy way to earn a few extra bucks on her commute.
“I think it’ll catch on,” she told the WSJ. “It’s cheap and it’s easy.”
Since its launch in 2012 Instacart has offered consumers a way to shop at their local grocery store without actually going to the store. Instead, hired shoppers would be sent a list of products, grab them off shelves, and drive them to a customer’s home or business where they often — but not always — receive a tip. But starting next month, the company is changing the way it handles tips, leaving some contractors and customers up in arms.
Instacart announced last week that starting Oct. 1 it would no longer collect tips online, but would collect a service amount from customers instead.
The company says that customers can choose how much of a service amount they want to provide and Instacart will then pass those funds along to its contractors — the driver or shopper handling orders.
Instacart claims that the change was intended to create “more consistent pay with fewer variables” and provide “higher guaranteed delivery commissions.”
TechCrunch reported that Instacart COO Ravi Gupta characterized the change as providing drivers with somewhere around $10-$12 per delivery, rather than the current $5/delivery plus tips.
• Instacart Drivers & Shoppers: Tell us what you think about this change. Send an email to Tips@consumerist.com. We will not identify you publicly.
While the increase seems pretty straightforward, shoppers and drivers have expressed concern that the new service amount wouldn’t actually go to just the driver responsible for the trip, but be split between all of those working for the company.
One recent blog post argues that the language used by Instacart is vague about who exactly receives the new not-a-tip.
The article includes a screengrab of a note sent to Instacart workers about the change. In response to the question “Who receives the service charge?” Instacart claims that 100% of the money goes to shoppers, but that the fee is spread out among the entire fleet of shoppers; not just the ones at a particular store or in one region.
Critics of the change question whether this is an appropriate way to allot this additional charge.
“Sure, the driver or shopper you just interacted with did get some money—but not directly,” writes Piss.io’s Jon Hendren. “It’s folded into part of the flat, standard fee, and that’s it.”
Without directly acknowledging the claims in that particular article, Instacart today posted a response to critics, maintaining that the change will indeed benefit its workers.
“Ever since we announced that we’re going to make changes to our shopper payment model, we’ve heard some misconceptions that we want to address,” the company says.
First, the company says that all of the funds provided in a service amount will go to shoppers/drivers. The company also clarified why it made the change and that Instacart will not keep and of those funds.
Instacart says that under the previous model it noticed that about 20% of the customers did not tip at all. And, around 40% of the customers tipped provide very small tips, around less than $2.
“This was a problem because shoppers were reliant on tips as a major source of pay,” the company writes. “At Instacart, we believe that shoppers should not have to rely on tips and instead just make fair, guaranteed and predictable pay. So, we decided to change that.”
The company provided an example of the pay change for a driver in San Francisco:
Additionally, Instacart says it will provide the top 25% of all shoppers with a $100 weekly bonus based on their five-star ratings.
In the end, the company claims that a driver in San Francisco could earn between $15 and $20/hour of work.
• Instacart Drivers & Shoppers: Tell us what you think about this change. Send an email to Tips@consumerist.com. We will not identify you publicly.
A restaurant might already have enough competition from other eateries next door, across the street, or even in the same building, so they probably don’t want yet a competing restaurant on wheels parking on their block. But when restaurants and food trucks share a similar menu, can a city require that they not share the same general space?
Earlier this year, we told you about Baltimore food truck owners who were challenging a new city ordinance that prohibits these rolling restaurants from operating within 300 feet of “any retail business establishment that is primarily engaged in selling the same type of food product, other merchandise, or service as that offered by the mobile vendor.”
A pair of truck owners sued the city, claiming that the so-called “300-foot rule” violates their rights to equal protection and due process under the Maryland state constitution.
The city responded by filing a motion to dismiss [PDF], arguing that the rule is a “wholly local economic regulation that does not interfere with a fundamental right” that serves the legitimate interest of advancing the general welfare of Baltimore.
“Brick-and-mortar restaurants are essential to the local economy. Unlike food trucks, restaurants are permanent fixtures in a local community,” explains a memorandum of law filed with the motion. “A restaurant can serve as an anchor business in a commercial district that attracts other complimentary [sic] businesses. The immobility of a restaurant forces it to be accountable to the local community that it serves… Encouraging economic development in the City’s commercial districts, which will in turn provide economic stability, is a legitimate exercise of a legislature’s police power.”
The city maintains that it’s within its discretion to “determine what may have a deleterious effect on the local economy,” and theorizes that “It is wholly possible that by parking directly in front of a pizzeria or a barbecue restaurant the Plaintiffs could harm local businesses.”
The food trucks fired back with a response [PDF], saying the case should not be dismissed at this early stage because they had already pleaded sufficient facts and a valid claim for relief. They also claimed that legal challenges to similar proximity-based restrictions at least proceeded to the evidentiary hearing stage.
“[T]he motion to dismiss stage is neither the time nor the place for Defendant’s factual disputes and imagined justifications,” reads the response. “Dismissal is only appropriate if the facts and inferences arising from Plaintiffs’ Complaint itself would, if proven, still not afford them relief.”
The plaintiffs also say the city ignored a number of the facts that underly the original complaint, such as the argument that the 300-foot rule does not merely restrict where food trucks can operate, but effectively determines which kinds of food trucks can operate where.
One plaintiff operates a pizza food truck; the other sells barbecue. The pizza truck is barred under the rule from setting up shop near an existing pizzeria, but the other plaintiff could park in that 300-foot zone (assuming no one nearby sells barbecue).
Likewise, while the city contends that the purpose of the rule is to protect established bricks-and-mortar restaurants, the plaintiffs counter that there is nothing in the ordinance to prevent a new pizzeria opening up down the street from an existing pizza shop.
“These facts together demonstrate that the 300-foot proximity ban (1) arbitrarily discriminates between food trucks; (2) arbitrarily restricts where mobile vendors, like Plaintiffs, may operate; (3) bears no rational relationship to any legitimate government interest; and (4) serves only to protect the private financial interests of brick-and-mortar businesses from mobile vendor competition,” argue the plaintiffs.
This morning, the judge issued an order [PDF] denying the city’s motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs had indeed pleaded sufficient facts and stated a valid claim for relief.
The food trucks still have a long road ahead of them before this matter is resolved, but today’s decision gets them through the first big legal roadblock.
“Contrary to the city’s argument, Maryland courts take seriously the right to pursue one’s chosen profession free from arbitrary and irrational regulations,” said attorney Greg Reed, who argued the case.
Another day, another major auto manufacturer announcing plans for a self-driving vehicle: this time it’s Volvo, which says it will offer a fully autonomous car to luxury buyers in five years.
The vehicle will be sold to individual buyers, who can fork over about $10,000 extra to purchase autopilot features, Bloomberg Technology reports.
The feature will allow occupants to completely disengage from driving but there will still be a steering wheel for when the owner feels like using it, according to Chief Executive Officer Hakan Samuelsson, speaking to reporters at the Global Mobility Leadership Forum near Detroit on Thursday.
“To make a car even more premium, one of the most interesting things is a full autopilot,” he said. “Not a supervised version, but really the one that you can sit back and watch a movie or whatever. That will make the premium car even more premium.”
He says Volvo’s autopilot features will be different from others like Tesla, because those require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel in case they need to take control.
Uber is currently using Volvo self-driving vehicles in a test in Pittsburgh that lets customers order a driverless car, but Uber engineers are also present to grab the wheel when needed and make notes about the trip.
Going to an actual attendant and paying cash for gas is something fewer and fewer of us do every year. But for all the problems of cash, it might be less risky than sticking your credit card in any old gas pump, where a skimmer can grab and steal your data with very little effort. And those skimmers are everywhere. Case in point? Arizona.
Why Arizona? Well, for two reasons. One, because the state has kept accessible records handy for researchers like Krebs to read, and from which he could create a cool map of incidents.
But also because gas stations there have proven to be super-easy targets, Krebs writes: the vast majority of stations that have been hit are missing fairly low-tech counters. They don’t have security cameras, nor do they have tamper-evident seals on the pumps. That means basically anyone can mess with the pump’s payment system, and nobody will notice or be able to track who.
And messing with those pumps is painfully easy, Krebs continues, because most of the stations where skimmers have been found are still using the factory-default locks on the pumps — meaning basically anyone with a master key could pop ’em all open.
It’s easy to pick the lowest-hanging fruit, basically. The thieves are targeting smaller, independent stations likely to have fewer resources than a massive chain, and worse security practices. They tend to be near highways, for a quick getway.
And since more and more skimmers use bluetooth wireless techology, nobody has to come back suspciously to the scene of the crime to collect the data. They only have to pull up, as if pumping gas, to download it from nearby.
In short, Krebs says, the available data point to “a clear trend of fraudsters targeting owners and operators that flout basic security best practices.” And Arizona, he adds, is just a microcosm — this is happening everywhere (like Dallas and New England and…).
As for what you can do, well, the answer is probably not all that much. By all means, have a good look at any credit card slot before you put your card in, and don’t ever use one that seems suspicious. But skimmers are getting smaller and easier to hide all the time so in the long run, your best bet is always going to be keeping a tight eye on all your statements and reporting any fraudulent charges to your bank ASAP.
There are travel hiccups that keep passengers from getting to their destination by a few hours. And then there are ordeals that keep people in limbo for days. Case in point: a Southwest Airlines flight from the Dominican Republic to Atlanta that turned into a three-day real life nightmare.
Southwest Airlines flight 1239 was set to take off from Punta Cana on Sunday night with its 160 passengers when travel plans went out the window, 11 Alive reports.
According to passengers, they had been waiting inside the plane for about an hour when the pilot announced there was a mechanical issue and they would have to spend another night in paradise.
“They told us that we were gonna have to stay they night and they would put us in a hotel,” one passenger recalls. ”We were fine with that. We thought, safety first.”
Except, it wasn’t paradise, as the passengers quickly found out. Instead, they tell 11 Alive that the hotel was dirty and all around unacceptable.
“It was so filthy. There were bugs everywhere. There was blood on the sheets, feces on the walls,” one passenger alleges.
Others say that the hotel tried to accommodate as many stranded travelers as possible by putting strangers in rooms together.
“They wanted four people per room, so whether you knew each other or not, they wanted you in a room,” another traveler tells 11 Alive.
Several of the travelers decided they couldn’t stay in the hotel, and chose to relocate to another resort at their own expense.
One couple tells NBC Chicago that their bill quickly reached $500 for the hotel and transportation back to the airport on Monday.
On Monday, the passengers, ready for the trek home, faced more issues
“So they board us but the minute we got on we knew something was wrong because it was hot on the plane,” a passenger tells NBC DFW. “I mean it was hot.”
Unimpressed with the travel accommodations and continued plane issues, the passengers created a Facebook page “Stranded in Punta Cana” to air their grievances.
After spending another hour on the hot plane, the pilot once again canceled the trip because of a mechanical issue.
Passengers tell 11 Alive that after complaining to the airline about the previous night’s accommodations, Southwest agreed to move travelers to another hotel Monday evening.
Tuesday’s travel plans were also mired with issues, NBC DFW reports. When passengers arrived they were told the crew tasked with flying them home had met their maximum number of hours allowed, and a second crew had to be brought in. That translated to a few more hours of waiting.
Eventually, the plane took off on Tuesday evening, with passengers applauding.
Southwest Airlines apologized for the inconvenience in a statement to NBC Chicago, noting that it “offered a gesture of goodwill to each customer in the amount of two $200 vouchers to use as travel credit for future travel, arranged hotel accommodations for two nights in Punta Cana, and are in the process of offering a one-way refund.”
However, the airline says it will not pay for other expenses, including food, taxis, and hotels that were booked by passengers.
Despite the efforts at a mea culpa, some passengers say they won’t be traveling with the airline again.
“I think it should be more than that,” one traveler said. “A lot more.”
Joining Starbucks bottled beverages on store shelves next year will be Dunkin’ Donuts, which says it’s teaming up with Coca-Cola to launch ready-to drink iced coffee products.
Dunkin’ apparently timed the news to National Coffee Day, announcing that Coca-Cola will be in charge of manufacturing, distributing, and selling, but the products will be branded by Dunkin’.
The iced coffee drinks will use the same Arabica coffee blends Dunkin’ uses in its other coffee offerings, and will be available with milk and sugar in a variety of flavors in grocery and convenience stores, by mass merchandisers, and inside Dunkin’ restaurants across the U.S.
Dunkin’ is hoping its first foray into the ready-to-drink coffee category will give it a chunk of the $2.3 billion a year market. Also: millennials.
“This new product introduction will increase consumption of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and increase our brand relevance with existing and new consumers, including many younger customers, which we believe will in turn, drive incremental visits to our restaurants,” Dunkin’ Brands Chairman and CEO Nigel Travis said in a statement.
The company adds that it will equally share net profits from sales of the drinks that happen outside restaurants with “qualified” U.S. franchisees.
While the number of borrowers defaulting on their federal student loans didn’t increase this year, the number of consumers who remain in default hasn’t really change either, creating a stand-still of sorts.
A new report from the Department of Education found that for the third consecutive year, there was a drop in the percentage of borrowers who are defaulting on their student loans within three years of entering repayment. This is known as the cohort default rate.
According to the report, among the 5.2 million borrowers who entered repayment in 2013, 11.3% (or 593,182) had defaulted on their loans by 2015.
In all, the default rate dropped for two of the main college sectors. The default rate was 11.3% for students at public schools; 15% for students at for-profit colleges. Conversely, defaults actually increased slightly at private institutions, with 7% of student defaulting on their 2013 loans. Previously, the rate for private schools was 6.8%.
While the continued decrease in defaults is likely good news for borrowers and the government, there’s also some not so stellar news in the report: there are a record 8.1 million borrowers currently in default, according to The Institute for College Access & Success.
“It’s great that recent borrowers are entering default at a slower rate,” Lauren Asher, president of The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS). “Yet the escalating number of people in default demonstrates that more must be done to help students avoid and get out of default.”
While the Dept. of Education offers repayment plans to assist students in making monthly payments, it also has in place rules that would penalize schools that graduate students unable to meet their debt obligations.
The Dept. of Education uses the cohort default to determine a school’s eligibility to receive federal financial aid funds. If a school’s CDR is too high, then students of that school are not allowed to participate in the programs.
Any school with a default rate of 30% or more for three consecutive years, or a 40% rate for one year, faces the loss of access to those federal programs.
This year, the Department identified 10 schools that had default rates high enough to lose eligibility for federal aid programs. Of those schools, nine were from the for-profit sector. Each school will have an opportunity to appeal the loss of funds.
Affected schools are:
• Cr’u Institute of Cosmetology and Barbering in Garden Grove, CA
• Capstone College in Pasadena, CA
• Florida Barber Academy in Plantation, FL
• Total Look School of Cosmetology and Massage Therapy in Cresco, IA
• Larry’s Barber College in Chicago
• Crescent City School of Gaming & Bartending in New Orleans
• Aaron’s Academy of Beauty in Waldorf, MD
• United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, ND
• New Life Business Institute in Jamaica, NY
• Jay’s Technical Institute in Houston, TX
These schools, of course, do not represent the entire 8.1 millions student currently in default, but TICAS suggests that many of those borrowers have attended for-profit schools that are either in operation or have recently closed.
“While the Department does not release school-level default rates for closed schools, the 8.1 million borrowers currently in default include students who attended schools that have now closed,” TICAS said in a statement. “Many of the schools that closed recently, such as Corinthian-owned Everest, Wyotech, and Heald College campuses and Marinello Schools of Beauty, are known to have committed widespread fraud, putting their former students at greater risk of default.”
TICAS, along with The Association of Community College Trustees – which reported a decrease in default rates among community colleges — called on the Dept. of Education to increase transparency and accountability for loan servicing as a way to better provide relief for burgeoned student loan borrowers.
“The reality is that default penalizes not only students, but our communities,” J. Noah Brown, president and CEO of ACCT, said in a statement. “It is incumbent upon the Education Department to likewise make adjustments to existing policies so that students who do falter won’t continue to suffer undue consequences.”
Things got a bit heated at a Walmart in Massachusetts recently, after a employee allegedly set three fires inside the store.
Police responded to the store around 5:25 p.m. on Tuesday after a report of a fire in the store’s jewelry section, MassLive.com reports. When they arrived they found it wasn’t just the one fire — there were three set throughout the store.
“All three fires had been extinguished by Walmart staff and several customers who used the fire extinguishers that were located throughout the store,” police said, adding that no one was injured.
After officials determined that the fires had been deliberately set, the suspect was identified on a surveillance video. She had been seen fleeing, police said, and investigators called her to ask her to come back to the store — but she hung up on them. The next day she turned herself in and was arrested.
She’s now facing three counts of burning a building’s contents, three counts of destruction of property over $250, and one count each of disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. The store had to close to deal with smoke and fire damage.
Imagine you’re a politician who received tens of thousands of dollars in recent years from a bank, and hundreds of thousands from a banking industry that wants to do away with new consumer protections. Then that bank is caught opening up millions of fake accounts without authorization. If you’re one of these bank-backed legislators, this huge scandal is apparently an opportunity to take shots at the federal regulator the banking industry has been trying to undermine since its creation.
This morning’s House Financial Services Committee hearing on the ongoing Wells Fargo debacle spent an awful lot of time on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that recently hit Wells with a $185 settlement over the mountain of bogus bank accounts, and which has been the target of pro-bank lawmakers since it was created as part of the 2010 financial reforms.
“We are here today because millions of Americans were ripped off by their bank and seemingly let down by their government,” said committee chair, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (TX). “If [the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] had examiners on site at Wells Fargo during the time when fraudulent accounts were open and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was conducting regulator investigations, why did it take the Los Angeles Times to expose the fraud? And once exposed why did it take almost 18 months for the CFPB to initiate a supervisory review?”
Hensarling has been a vocal opponent of the CFPB, sponsoring multiple pieces of legislation to reshape the Bureau to be less efficient and put its budget directly under the control of Congress. He’s also, as Allied Progress points out, received more than $33,000 from Wells Fargo and its executives since 2011. According to OpenSecrets.org, Hensarling has taken in nearly half a million dollars from commercial banks and investment firms during the current election cycle alone.
Likewise, when Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ) commented that the “CPFB has one job and they blew it,” you have to wonder whether that’s his principles talking, or the $20,250 he’s received from Wells and its executives since 2011 (not to mention the more than $350,000 he’s received from banks and investment firms in the current election cycle).
In total, per the Allied Progress report, Wells Fargo and its execs have contributed more than $560,000 to around three dozen members of the Financial Services Committee — ranging from as little as $2,000 to Rep. Bruce Poliquin (ME) to as much as $55,700 for committee vice-chair Rep. Patrick McHenry (NC). Regardless of the amount contributed to these lawmakers, they all sponsored or co-sponsored at least one piece of legislation intended to gut the CFPB.
Thankfully, this morning’s hearing did also attempt to hold Wells Fargo accountable for its own bad behavior. Hensarling and other members of the Committee didn’t hold back when it came to grilling Stumpf on what he knew, when he knew it, and why action wasn’t taken.
Stumpf said that from 2011 to 2013 the board would get reports at a committee level about ethics line requests related to the issue, but maintained that he didn’t know about the fraudulent account openings until 2013, when it was growing in the California area. All that despite being the chairman of the Wells Fargo board.
New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney — who has received her fair share of contributions from the financial industries, but has not signed on to any legislation to gut the CFPB — questioned Wells Fargo’s knowledge of the fraudulent actions by employees, citing reports that workers brought the issues to light as far back as 2007.
“When you were asked if you would extend the review back to before 2009, you refused to commit to extending the review back even earlier,” she stated. “If you were presented with evidence that Wells was engaged in some of these same illegal practices prior to 2009, would that change your mind about extending the review?”
Once again, Stumpf said he would take the matter into consideration.
Maloney also questioned Stumpf’s action in the selling of $13 million in Wells Fargo stock in Oct. 2013, suggesting the sale was made because the CEO had become aware of the fraudulent account issues.
“It’s suspicious that this happened after your billion-dollar bank was turned into a school for scoundrels,” she said. “Did you dump $13 million worth of Wells Fargo stock on the open market after you found the bank had been fraudulently opening hundreds of thousands of scam accounts ripping off customers?”
Stumpf denied the allegations, noting that he currently holds four times as many shares in the bank than he is required.
When asked to classify what happened with the two million unauthorized accounts, Stumpf once again declined to say they were fraudulent or part of a scheme.
“I think it was dishonest, it broke our code of ethics,” he said.
That answer didn’t sit well with Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy ($23,000 from Wells and associates since 2011), who questioned why the bank didn’t take action sooner, and why it turned a blind eye.
“You have got to be kidding me. Board members knew in 2011, they were looking at this, and if they are looking at 1,000 people fired, and they don’t know why,” Duffy said. “If they pulled the curtain back, if you want to call defrauding customers or stealing, it’s obvious that Wells Fargo had a big problem.”
“You have clearly failed, you’ve clearly failed in your own ethical standards internally,” McHenry said after reading the bank’s code of ethics and business conduct, which states all employees, including executives, are required to follow the law. “You have broken, and your company has broken, long-standing laws and defrauded customers.”
Stumpf noted that the company’s customer service rates are the highest they have ever been and that the culture of the bank is worth being proud of.
“For you to say the culture is okay is telling me you’re tone deaf,” McHenry countered. “The impact is not on your insinuation, but on the wider industry on how consumers access credit.”
As for what the bank is doing now, Stumpf reiterated that the company will undergo a full review of sales practices going back to 2009.
While the bank announced earlier this month that it would end sales goals by Jan. 2017, Stumpf said on Thursday that the date has been moved up to Oct. 1.
“We want to make sure that nothing stands in the way of our customers,” he said, noting that the bank is working on a new incentive program that will better compensate employees. It was unclear how this program would differ from sales goals.
Additionally, he says the bank has already begun reaching out to customers affected by the fraudulent accounts, noting that 20,000 credit card holders have already been contacted. So far, he claims 25% of those customers say they either didn’t want or don’t recall signing up for the credit cards.
To remedy the situation, the bank has closed accounts that customers do not want, notified the credit reporting bureaus, and refunded any fees incurred.
For deposit accounts, the bank is contacting customers to examine how they were affected.
“There’s no question that we’ve done things, and we’re working to make that right,” Stumpf said.
But when lawmakers compared the situation to someone robbing a Wells Fargo bank, Stumpf claimed that breaking the law was totally different.
While moving walkways have become ubiquitous at airports around the country — along with the rage that comes from getting stuck behind the person who chooses to stand still and block everyone else from walking on them — conveyor belts that shuttled people around were invented long before air travel became the norm.
USA Today takes a look back at moving sidewalks, flat escalators, or Trav-O-Lator machines, which is what the Otis Elevator company called their patented version in 1955.
“No matter what you choose to call it, a moving walkway is a simple variation of the conveyor belt,” Steve Showers, corporate archivist for the Otis Elevator Company, told USA Today.
Moving walkways first showed up at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, followed by a “Moving Pavement” experience at the Paris Expo in 1900, but weren’t commonly used until air travel and airports expanded in the 1950s, Showers notes.
Dallas Love Field Terminal — which opened in 1958 — was the first to install a moving sidewalk: passengers could travel from the main terminal to the first gates in each of the airport’s three concourses on the walkways.
The new technology had its share of hiccups though, including mechanical shutdowns due to clothing and shoes getting stuck in it, or minor injuries from the moving handrail, according to Bruce Bleakley, director of the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, author of a book on the history of Love Field.
Unfortunately, Love Field was also where the first death from a moving walkway was reported, when a two-year-old girl was killed on Jan. 1, 1960 after her clothing got tangled in the metal step plate at the end.
That didn’t keep other airports from installing moving walkways, however, as evidenced by their ubiquity all around the world now.
“The reasons have not changed,” Jonathan Massey, aviation sector leader at the Corgan, architecture and design firm told USA Today, “We put in moving walkways to let people get to their gates with fewer steps and less effort.”
We are sure you will be shocked, shocked to hear that a major telecom company that currently makes some money from having customers pay to keep private data private wants to be able to continue doing so whenever possible. And yet, here we are.
FierceWireless reports that at a conference this week, AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie offered some thoughts about the ISP privacy rule the FCC is mulling over.
“There always should be a level playing field,” Lurie complained. That stance is neither new nor surprising from AT&T, which has complained before about how unfair it will be if Google and Facebook can collect, share, and sell your data but carriers like AT&T can’t.
Lurie was also asked directly about AT&T using its wireless customers’ information to provide targeted advertising. He promised the company respects customers’ privacy, saying “We’ve always been very, very transparent about our policy … We have earned the trust of our customers and we have to keep that trust.”
It’s not so clear whether AT&T has really earned that trust, though. The company began charging 40% more to U-verse GigaPower customers who opt to keep their data private in 2013, a program it has since expanded to other cities.
AT&T has objected in the past to having its “Internet Preferences” option called a pay-for-privacy scheme… except, it is. Consumers who want to keep their private data private pay $29 per month more ($99 vs. $70) for that privacy.
AT&T does not yet apply such a program to its wireless customers, but it’s unsurprising that they want to leave the door open for just that. The proposed rule the FCC is currently considering may apply to both wireless and fixed-line (your home broadband) carriers, if adopted; AT&T clearly wants to prevent that.
And indeed, AT&T has company from other ISPs that also hate the FCC’s proposal. Comcast argued in August that you, the consumer, would actually suffer actual, active harm if Comcast isn’t allowed to charge you extra for privacy. (Yes, really.)
Comcast doesn’t have a program like AT&T’s yet, but wants to be able to do so in the future. Preventing the trade-off of personal data for money would deprive consumers of lower-priced offerings, Comcast said, and would therefore be bad for everyone.
It looks like Spotify could be preparing to shore up its streaming music service amid competition in the digital field: according to a new report, Spotify is in advanced talks to buy SoundCloud.
The Financial Times cites one of those mysterious, all-powerful “people brief ed on the discussions,” who said it was unclear how much Spotify would be willing to shell out for the company, and discussions could well result in a dead end.
Insiders at Spotify say SoundCloud has been viewed as a threat as long as it was considering offering a cheaper, mid-tier subscription service that might have rivaled Spotify. But when it decided not to go that route — offering a standard $9.99 monthly option instead — things changed, sources say.
The acquisition would bring SoundCloud’s community of independent creators along with it, folks who have uploaded, recorded, and promoted their original mixes and DJ sets on the platform.
Apple recently announced that its Apple Music Service has 17 million subscribers, with Spotify announcing soon after that it hit 40 million paying subscribers.
Yet another former Wells Fargo employee has come forward to talk about the high-pressure atmosphere created by the bank, where she says there were only two types of employees: those who sold customers on products they didn’t want, and those that were shown the door.
Today’s Washington Post features a first-person account from a former Wells Fargo personal banker, who recalls working late on Christmas Eve, after the bank had closed and her co-workers had all gone home, trying to persuade her family members and friends to open accounts with the bank so she could meet sales quotas.
“During my time at Wells, my colleagues and I were pressured to sell, sell, sell accounts to people who really didn’t want them — blurring ethical lines along the way,” the former employee writes.
She says she didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, unless she wanted to be out a job. Instead, she observed fellow co-workers, who were making their goals, and took their lead with “assumptive sales.”
“We’d tell [customers] what they’d be getting, but we’d never ask customers what they wanted,” she writes. “We’d place them in a position where they may feel uncomfortable saying no; they may think they are actually getting a great deal; they’re simply overwhelmed with too much information all at once; and they’ve sunk the cost of spending the afternoon with one of us, so they might as well just say yes.”
The former banker admits that in the end the desire to make goal was also about her competitive spirit and wanting to do a good job. But, she says, Wells Fargo also created that atmosphere with team meetings and call nights centered around how much employees were selling.
For example, she claims that each branch would host a “huddle” where managers would ask tellers what they were “committed” to for that day, meaning how many accounts could they open, services they could sell.
“Huddles were a chance to be treated like a minor god, or publicly shamed,” she says.
Each week, the former employee says, she and co-workers were required to stay late to cold-call customers, asking them to open accounts. In most cases, she says the employees would call friends and family members and persuade them to open accounts so they could go home.
“A day might end at 7 p.m. with tired high-fives and pats on the back, but it would all be forgotten by the next morning,” she recalls. “And for a lot of bank managers, that wasn’t enough.”
While lawmakers are looking to determine if the opening of fraudulent accounts unfairly targeted senior citizens, the former employee says that her branch specialized in going after younger consumers — namely college students. Because the branch served several college campuses, the woman says she and co-workers knew that many of the accounts they opened for students would either go unfunded or negative in a matter of weeks or months.
Eventually, she says she left Wells Fargo after realizing she had become consumed with work, and the sales goals that went along with it.
The case that will go before the U.S. Supreme Court involves the trademark for The Slants, an Oregon-based rock band whose Asian-American members knowingly took the controversial pejorative for their name as a deliberate commentary on the state of race, culture, and music.
Unlike the Redskins trademark, which the USPTO granted and had repeatedly upheld before ultimately deciding in 2014 to cancel it, the band’s application to trademark the “Slants” name was rejected.
Rejecting or canceling a trademark doesn’t prevent the applicant from using that mark — it just means there are no protections against someone else using the same name. Because the mark could still be used in commerce, courts had previously held that the Lanham Act — the law that includes these prohibitions — was not overly restrictive of the First Amendment right to free expression.
By deeming something offensive or disparaging — and thus unable to be trademarked — the appeals court concluded that the government is expressing its disapproval of a particular name or term.
“When the government discriminates against speech because it disapproves of the message conveyed by the speech, it discriminates on the basis of viewpoint,” read the majority opinion in that case.
In April 2016, the USPTO petitioned the Supremes, arguing that the Lanham act was not a restriction on private speech or conduct, but “simply offers federal benefits on terms that encourage private activity consonant with legislative policy.”
Slants’ frontman Simon Tam responded to the petition [PDF] saying that even though he’d been successful in his appeal, he welcomed the opportunity to bring this issue before SCOTUS, and his actual control of the Slants mark remains in limbo unless the nation’s highest court chimes in.
“This issue is undeniably important,” reads Tam’s brief. “The Court is very likely to address it in the near future, in another case if not in this one.”
One such case is the Redskins’ dispute with the USPTO. The NFL team has also petitioned SCOTUS to hear its appeal, even though a circuit court of appeals has yet to hear oral arguments in the case.
In his brief, Tam had asked SCOTUS to either hear his case alongside the Redskins’ case or at least not wait until the NFL team’s dispute had gone through all the routine appellate stages before hearing them together, as the USPTO “has halted the processing of all trademark applications raising disparagement issues” pending the SCOTUS ruling.
In addition to petitioning for their own appeal, the Redskins filed a brief [PDF] in the Slants case, arguing that the Supremes should not take up that petition, thus allowing the D.C. Circuit ruling to stand, which would benefit the team. At the very least, the Redskins wanted the two matters heard together.
Today’s list of petitions granted did not include the Redskins appeal, nor did it deny that petition. Regardless of whether SCOTUS hears arguments specific to the team’s dispute, the court’s decision (assuming there’s not another tie) will certainly have a direct impact on the status of the Redskins’ trademark.
Carolina Panthers fullback Mike Tolbert was apparently so displeased with the service he received from a car shop that he paid the business almost $4,000 using nothing but change.
Tolbert wrote on Instagram that the job — replacing the engine in one of his cars — was supposed to take just 10 days. Two and a half months later it still wasn’t done, he claims, which ticked him off.
In his post, he warned followers away from the business, adding that the shop upped the original price quote, and that he was handled differently than other customers because he’s an NFL player.
“I expected a level of professionalism that I did not receive and the owner expected me to pay more because I’m ‘a millionaire’!!!!” he wrote.
The business posted a reply on Facebook, FoxSports.com reports, saying Tolbert had paid his $3,900 all in coins, a move the player confirmed to ESPN.
“Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, everything,” he said. “I didn’t even care, I didn’t care one bit. I took a truckload of them and put it right there where he wanted, and I got my car towed back to my buddy’s shop.”
The business was not pleased with the coin payment, he notes, adding, “but they got what they asked for.”
Tobacco giant Philip Morris is working on the future of smoking, and it’s not cigarettes or vaping. The company is investing heavily in a product with the baffling name IQOS, a device that lets users heat up and inhale mini stacks of tobacco, without actually setting them on fire. Will “reduced harm” products like this catch on with the public all over the world?
Don’t confuse IQOS with vaping: the product is marketed toward smokers who are interested in cutting down their health risk from smoking, but who aren’t ready to give up the flavor and feel of actual tobacco yet. Vaping liquids may or may not contain nicotine, but aren’t made from tobacco leaves.
The IQOS system has a device that’s a little bit like an e-cigarette, which heats up mini tobacco sticks that are about half the size of a normal cigarette. Users heat up the sticks with their device and smoke without really smoking: the device is considered a hybrid between e-cigarettes and the analog type.
Philip Morris also sees the product as a potnetially profitable one. In a presentation to investors in Switzerland recently, the company laid out its plans for the IQOS. It will be available in 35 countries in 2017, and the company believes that “reduced-risk” products like it will eventually replace old-fashioned cigarettes.
One key feature: since the product are so new, not all countries tax them in hte same way as cigarettes, creating an interesting opening in the market.
Will people use them as a tool to quit, or just to smoke in a way that seems less risky? We’ll find out, especially once the IQOS spreads to more countries.
While some of us haven’t yet gotten all the beach sand out of shoes or pulled out the fall blankets, there are 34 million people out there who are already in the holiday spirit and have started shopping.
There are still 87 shopping days left before Christmas, but according to CreditCards.com, plenty of people are wasting no time in getting a jump on the shopping competition.
But if the idea of heading out now to buy gifts for people long before December makes you laugh, you aren’t alone.
“Most Americans are annoyed by these overachievers,” said Matt Schulz, CreditCards.com’s senior industry analyst. “The majority thinks stores should begin putting up their holiday displays and advertising holiday sales around Thanksgiving.”
Specifically, 74% of those polled agreed — including 48% who strongly agreed — with the statement, “It’s annoying that the holiday shopping season has gotten earlier.”
Most people (52%) say the time to start shopping is around Thanksgiving, while 12% like to wait until just two weeks before Christmas to get going.
But it’s not likely that we’ll see an end to Christmas Creep any time soon — if shoppers want to holiday shop, retailers are going to provide.
“If the consumers are asking for holiday products earlier in the year, you are more than likely to see retailers start having a small assortment by late summer and build up their inventory as we move into the holiday season,” Ana Serafin Smith, spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation, a trade group, told CreditCards.com. “It is natural that retailers are reacting to this trend.”
So where will people be doing this shopping, whenever they choose to begin? A—bout 58% are still fans of doing most of their purchasing in stores, while 21% prefer using computers, and 11% like to shop on mobile devices best.
what a champ
(@aviannaaaaa) September 30, 2016
free catering coming soon
