The Therma Scarf, a polyester/cotton blend scarf with pockets and microwaveable heat packs marketed by infomercial powerhouse Telebrands, has been recalled. The scarf’s heat packs, made of flaxseeds, pose a fire and burn hazard to wearers. In a related story, someone actually thought it would be a good idea to make a microwaveable scarf with pockets.
Users were told that they could remove the packets for microwaving, or stick the entire scarf in the oven. Back in January, a Pennsylvania TV station tried out the Therma Scarf, and their sample caught fire. The CPSC has received a total of seven reports of Therma Scarf-related fires.
Last spring, two morons videotaped themselves doing unspeakable things to the food they were about to serve at an unidentified Domino’s restaurant. The video was posted to YouTube, and the situation didn’t end well for anyone.
Based on a few clues, Consumerist commenters tracked the specific location down. The employees behind the video lost their jobs, that location closed a few months later, and no one could eat products from Domino’s without imagining that parts of their meal had been crammed up someone’s nose. While camerawoman Kristy Hammonds is still waiting for her trial, star Michael Setzer has been sentenced to 24 months of supervised probation.
Michael Setzer, 32, entered a so-called Alford plea, in which he did not admit guilt but acknowledged that he likely would be found guilty. A judge then sentenced him to probation and ordered him not to have contact with the other person involved in the video, Kristy Hammonds, 31.
We expected some kind of restriction against working in the food service industry as well, but it’s hard to imagine anyone hiring him.
Reader W.J. is a dumpster diver. During the controversy over H&M and Walmart destroying unsold clothing in Manhattan a few months ago, experienced dumpster divers pointed out that this is nothing new. W.J. e-mailed Consumerist about her recent find in the trash of an unnamed Eddie Bauer outlet store, and also made a video of her finds and how they were rendered unusable before throwing away.
She writes:
I am a dumpster diver. I find tons of useful items thrown away and often destroyed. I am accustomed, though it sickens me, to seeing items deliberately destroyed to prevent further use. I cannot count how many times I have seen this over the years. I had never heard this common practice given any attention until I read about H&M and Walmart throwing away/destroying clothing. I know from personal experience that this is not a new practice. So, on a recent diving trip with my mother I brought back to my home and documented the find of destroyed clothing at an Eddie Bauer outlet.
I love finding free items in the dumpster and putting them to use. But I would rather find nothing at all and give up diving if it meant that retail outlets and other stores would donate or recycle their unused/returned items. Please help bring attention to this matter. It is easy to eliminate unnecessary waste from your own home and help the environment. But when it comes to corporate retail waste there is no one monitoring, no one watching the abundance carted off to landfills except us few divers. There aren’t enough divers out there to keep up with all the so called “trash”. Please help call out these stores on their unenforced donation policies.
Over at the Huffington Post, retired teacher Ernest Nitzberg blogged about the experience that made him sever his 44-year banking relationship with Chase. He writes that Chase accuses him of using a debit card that he was never issued to buy $6200 worth of merchandise that he was unlikely to want or need. Makes perfect sense to us, too.
I contacted Chase the day after I received my statement. I pointed out that I had not received a debit card and that it was completely out of character and history for a 78-year-old single man recently out of open heart surgery with no children or grandchildren of Toys R Us age and not in need of a Shalom dress or any of the items that Juicy Couture makes to buy that much crap in one day. I was assured that everything would be put right. After forms were completed and sent to Chase’s fraud unit and a report made to the police, I waited to have my faith in Chase’s fidelity to our long relationship restored. I trusted Chase to do the right thing by me.
A police investigation showed a woman in a hoodie with a scarf over her face at the ATM using my never-received debit card…immediately, I called Chase’s claims department. They kindly informed me that I would not get my money back because, according to their algorithms, I fit the profile of a credit card cheat. Mind you, I am, once again, a 78-year-old retired New York City public school teacher with no criminal record; but according to Chase, I was the most likely suspect. When asked about the woman with the hoodie and the scarf, Chase suggested that she probably was my accomplice.
After weeks of trying to plead my case while professing my innocence and fidelity to Chase, I was rudely told by the people at Chase’s Claims Department in Texas that the case was closed and that I should not bother to call them any more.
Were he a Consumerist reader writing to us for help, we would point Ernest toward the potentially helpful representative at Chase’s executive customer service department whose contact information we posted yesterday.
Oscar is being held hostage in the latest battle between the New York City-area ABC affiliate and cable provider Cablevision. At midnight last night, ABC7 cut off their feed to Cablevision, leaving millions Oscarless. This caught our attention not only because it was a spectacularly obnoxious negotiating ploy on ABC’s part, but also because local media are giving Cablevision customers some pretty bad advice.
The New York Daily News, in particular, offered advice to its readers on how to watch the Oscars without cable. Their options included:
Live Internet streams
Liveblogs
Twitter
On an iPhone
At the home of a friend with cable
Have we already forgotten that television signals are beamed, for free, through the air? Yes, you can connect an antenna to your television set and watch the Oscars. In fact, we hear that you can get rid of cable entirely and still have lots of interesting things on your television to stare at. If you’ve forgotten how to install a TV antenna, or never knew in the first place, the Internet can show you how.
You know what piece of technology confuses a lot of people? Eggs. At least that’s the impression I get from the existence of the EZ Cracker, a device which cracks and separates eggs for people who are probably too helpless to be allowed near a stove. Oh, and their commercial has–why not–Wendy from the old Snapple commercials.
This graph shows employment declines at the same chronological point during America’s last six recessions. Guess which one represents the current recession. Go ahead, guess. [New York Times] (Thanks, Dan!)
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is a flavor enhancer, similar in composition and tastiness to the much-maligned monosodium glutamate, that is seemingly unavoidable. Thanks to salmonella contamination in the HVP paste at Basic Food Flavors, Inc. in Las Vegas, the FDA has recalled every food containing the product, ranging from salty snacks to salad dressings to soup and gravy mixes. The list of recalled foods containing the product is still growing, and encompasses familiar brand names ranging from Walmart’s Great Value brand to McCormick to Trader Joe’s. Now we now get to find out exactly how complex our food supply is and how widely used an additive HVP is.
He announced the decision in a press conference on Friday. Since the relevant law depends on “community standards,” if the community finds kiosks valuable and such prosecutions a waste of time, there’s not much of a point.
“It’s not an exact barometer — I didn’t take a poll — but it just seemed pretty clear to me that the community would not be behind the prosecution of this,” Stan Levco said during Friday’s news conference. Well, Mr. Levco, Consumerist saved you the trouble and took a poll for you:
Chris tells Consumerist that he wanted to exchange $300 for a pair of headphones, but Best Buy was uninterested in actually selling them to him. Which is odd, since we thought that was the point of this whole “retail” thing.
He writes:
Just thought I’d share with the world, my experience at the Best Buy
location in [redacted], WI this evening.
I’m looking for an excellent pair of headphones, anything $80 and up,
so naturally I head to Best Buy knowing they have several models on
display. After trying a few out and getting a feel for what I’m
looking for, I take a look at a set of Bose QuietComfort headphones
and put them on. I like them, so naturally I look for a price tag.
None to be found. I look throughout the display, try to find the
headphones on endcaps in the entire area, nothing.
So I thought to myself “alright, perhaps an employee will walk by and
ask if I need help, but in the meantime I’ll keep looking around for
the headphones”. And after being in the store for 30 minutes, not a
single Best Buy employee came by to see if I needed anything. The
whole iPod/mp3 section of the area may as well been quarantined off.
Now I’m not entirely helpless where I need to be asked for help, but
out of all the times I get asked by retail clerks if I need assistance
(especially at a place like Best Buy where it’s practically guaranteed
you’ll be asked by someone for help), when I actually need it there is
naught a clerk to be found.
Instead of giving in and finding a clerk, I went to the nearby
laptop/HDTV on display, went to the Best Buy website, and looked up
the price myself. I plan on going back next week to pick up
headphones and a nettop, if any of the clerks will bother doing their
job.
The headphones are $300, by the way. And Best Buy couldn’t possibly
care less if you were interested in them.
So there, that’s my story. I want to vote with my wallet and just go
with NewEgg, but I don’t have to deal with shipping and waiting longer
when the store’s literally 5 miles from my house.
Maybe they don’t really want to sell any headphones because there’s no way to have the Geek Squad optimize them. Or is there?
Jon needs help in getting out from under a pile of junk mail. He writes that after falling for a psychic scam, his grandparents have ended up on mailing lists advertising every scam imaginable. They receive about one hundred pieces of mail per week. He wants to stop the deluge, but isn’t sure how. Can the Consumerist hive mind help him?
Long story short, my grandma fell for one of those mail-fraud psychic scams (Maria Duval – they prey on old people!) and now my grandparents seem to be on every mail scam list possible. They’re on a fixed income and cannot afford to get duped again. I’ve tried explaining it to my grandmother, but it’s largely lost on her. She really believes that there is a psychic out there who will give her advice or that she will win some international lottery. Is there a way to stop this?
They are regularly getting 100 pieces of garbage mail a week that looks somewhat official. It’s obvious that it would fool most elderly people into thinking it’s a legitimate cause or company.
I’ve thought about contacting the company that is handling their direct mailing, but I can’t find out exactly who it is or if they’d even stop it.
Any rock-solid advice? Would a generic cease and desist letter even help?
If he can figure out where to send it to, it would be a good idea for Jon’s grandparents to file a prohibitory order with the U.S. Postal Service. These are intended to stop unwanted pornography from arriving in people’s mailboxes, but case law has made the definition of “offensive” pretty broad in this case.
Here’s what a prohibitory order does:
The prohibitory order forbids the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns from making further mailings to the designated addressees, effective on the 30th calendar day after the mailer’s receipt of the order; directs immediate deletion of such addressees from all mailing lists owned or controlled by the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns; and prohibits any sale, rental, exchange, or other transaction by the mailer, his or her agents, or assigns, involving mailing lists bearing the names of the designated addressees.
Toyota has been criticized–and rightly so–for its handling of the recall clusterfracas in the United States and Europe. But how many cars have been recalled for possible unintended acceleration issues in Japan, where consumer protections are much weaker than in the U.S., Canada, and the E.U.? According to today’s New York Times, that would be zero. Even though some Japanese drivers have had similar runaway acceleration incidents, consumer protection in Japan is weak and the government tends to side with industry. This means that car owners experiencing problems have nowhere to turn.
Consumer advocacy is not a popular field in Japan, because it can get you arrested.
When it comes to cars, the rapid growth of the auto industry here and of car ownership in the 1960s and ’70s was accompanied by a spate of fatal accidents. A consumer movement soon emerged among owners of these defective vehicles.
The most active was the Japan Automobile Consumers Union, led by Fumio Matsuda, a former Nissan engineer often referred to as the Ralph Nader of Japan. But the automakers fought back with a campaign discrediting the activists as dangerous agitators. Mr. Matsuda and his lawyer were soon arrested and charged with blackmail. They fought the charges to Japan’s highest court, but lost.
Now, few people are willing to take on the country’s manufacturers at the risk of arrest, Mr. Matsuda said in a recent interview. “The state sided with the automakers, not the consumers,” he said.
Let’s hope that foreign attention to Toyota’s safety problems, along with the country’s brand-new consumer protection agency, will help stop any preventable accidents.
We have a lot of executive customer service contact information for Chase credit cards, but not as much for Chase bank. That’s all about to change, my friends. Here’s someone you can turn to if you have problems with the banking side of Chase. Remember, only pester executive customer service contacts once you’ve exhausted all other options.
Heather Joyner
Executive Specialist
800.242.7399 ext. 51279
713-262-1279 Direct Line
FAX: 281-915-0984 [email protected]
David referred a friend to DirecTV. The satellite provider has a pretty neat referral program, promising a discount to both the new customer and the person who referred them to DirecTV. Well, theoretically. David writes that he and his friend learned that in order to get their referral discounts, the new customer has to either sign up on the Web or call a special number. He didn’t know this, and now neither he nor his friend will get their discounts.
Two months ago I assisted an elderly friend upgrade to an HD
television to replace an very old set. I purchased it for her and
installed it, along with a new OTA antenna. She had been using DISH
satellite service for six years. They wouldn’t give her any free
upgrades. I recommended that she go with DIRECTV because of their
offers current at the time.
They have extensively advertised that they will pay $100 to each
directv subscriber who refers someone, and $100 to the new subscriber
as well. When my friend called Directv listed in the phone book, she
gave them my name and account number as required under the advertised
policy.
When I didn’t receive my credit and she didn’t receive hers, I called
Directv today. They told me that you have to call a “special” Directv
number to receive these rebates. They said that any other number
called will result in no rebate. You would have thought when she
called up and told them she was referred by me that she would have
been told to call the “special” number. This requirement is not noted
in any of the advertisements I have seen.
My 18-month retention requirement with Directv ends next month. You
can be sure I will then be switching to DISH, who will receive the $90
a month I’m currently paying DIRECTV.
Before switching providers, David, we’d recommend letting some higher-ranking people at DirecTV know about your predicament and the impending loss of your business.
The special 800 number is on DirecTV’s referral program page, but to be fair, it does not proclaim, “IF YOU DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER YOU WILL NOT GET YOUR DISCOUNT.” So, what do you think?
One of Xbox Live’s more irksome policies has been that if your gamertag happens to mention that you are gay or lesbian, that’s not permitted. (Or if you use your real name, which happens to contain the letters G-A-Y in that order.) But Microsoft has changed their code of conduct, and this policy is no more.
The Xbox LIVE Terms of Use and Code of Conduct are designed to create a place where people can safely enjoy all of the ways to interact on our service, be it online multiplayer gaming, photo sharing, Netflix parties, or social games such as 1 vs. 100, without fear of discrimination or harassment. As the service evolves and our customers provide us with feedback, these rules evolve to incorporate new features or changes in how people wish to interact.
With that in mind, I’d like to announce an update to the Xbox LIVE Terms of Use and Code of Conduct which will allow our members to more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles. Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community. This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms.
I truly believe that our diversity is what makes us strong: diversity in gaming and entertainment options, and diversity in the people that make up this amazing community. I look forward to seeing you on LIVE soon.
Redbox kiosks are cheap and convenient sources for DVD rentals. And, according to a prosecutor in southern Indiana, they’re corrupting our children. Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Stanley Levco has sent letters threatening legal action against retailers providing space to Redbox and MovieCube kiosks. The problem? Automated kiosks don’t have enough safeguards preventing minors from renting material that could theoretically harm them.
In Vanderburgh County, one letter — addressed to the general manager of a Schnuck’s grocery store and dated Jan. 27 — cites an Indiana law prohibiting dissemination of matter harmful to minors, a Class D felony. It says that category might include adult-rated videos in that store’s MovieCube kiosk, a Redbox competitor.
“We suggest that the machine or machines dispensing these materials at your location no longer provide access to videos, movies, games” and other material that are unrated or have ratings of R or even PG, the letter says.
Limiting kiosks’ selection to only G-rated movies certainly limits their usefulness and relevance, and means that renters will need to turn to brick-and-mortar video stores to rent movies with adult content. We’re sure it’s just a coincidence that the idea for the prosecutor’s action against video kiosks came from an attorney representing the owner of several Indiana video stores.
“I’m not on a crusade,” said Paul Black, an Evansville attorney who says he suggested the inquiry to Levco’s office on behalf of a client who operates several video store locations. “We’re just looking for a level playing field here.”
Among the company’s creditors? A television ad agency, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s law firm, NASCAR team Rusty Wallace Racing, and thousands of former customers who are owed refunds.
New York City area cable provider and ISP Cablevision is in a contract renewal fight with yet another content provider. This time, it’s ABC’s flagship broadcast station WABC that wants more money, and Cablevision has raised the stakes in the passive-aggressive public service announcement wars. They’ve redirected customers’ cable boxes to a special channel where a looped announcement plays, and have started a YouTube channel to get the word out to any non-customers who might happen to care.
Cablevision subscriber Gary told Consumerist what happened when he turned on his television recently:
Cablevision has apparently decided to play even harder with the ABC battle than they did with Scripps…. They’ve actually remotely changed the settings on home cable boxes (both of mine at home, and have confirmed this also with some friends) to go to channel 1999 when you power them on. What’s channel 1999? A looping video message very much in the same tone as what they ran on the Scripps channels during that whole debacle. I would expect that tone with the website etc, but I am AMAZED that they actually went as far as REMOTELY CHANGING SETTINGS ON YOUR BOX to force this issue down subscribers’ throats! I wonder how many complaints they will be getting about this……
Imagine it: you’re trying to patch things up with an estranged parent, and send a thoughtful gift for their birthday. You pay more than $50 for overnight shipping, and wait for the gift to arrive. Only 48 hours later, the item hasn’t even shipped yet, while an identical item headed for another recipient, sent using standard shipping, has already shipped. What? That’s what reader Janet writes happened to her when she ordered a coffee machine from Newegg for her mother’s birthday.
My mom and I have had a pretty strained relationship over the past few years. I tried to call her a couple of times but our conversations just never worked out. Over the weekend, my boyfriend proposed and we both decided it was high time to make amends with my mother. Her birthday was Wednesday so I decided to surprise her and get her the coffee maker she always wanted but was never able to afford.
Monday evening, I scoured the internet for the coffee maker. I was ready to pay any price to ensure it got to her in time. There were a couple of websites that had it for a great deal, but I went to Newegg.com because of their great reputation. J&R was out of stock on it, so Newegg was my next best choice. I paid an additional $54 for overnight shipping. I assumed that it would not go out Monday evening, but I was positive that it would go out Tuesday. I also ordered the coffee maker for another friend, standard shipping.
Tuesday came and went and I did not get an email confirmation that the order shipped. I figured they sent tracking emails the next day after it registered with UPS. Wednesday morning (today) I checked my email and I got a shipping confirmation for the second order I placed – the one with standard shipping. I immediately contacted Newegg to make sure the other shipped yesterday. I was positive it did.
Well, the customer service representative politely informed me that it did not ship yet because they allow 1-2 days for processing. A $54 shipping charge and the free shipping order that was placed after ships first!!! I was furious. The worst? I wasn’t offered a partial refund or even a guarantee that it would ship today! I still did not receive a shipping confirmation for the order. My mom’s birthday is today [Wednesday] and she will not be receiving her coffee maker.
To all you buyers out there, just because a company has a great name does not mean that they have a great shipping policy or great customer service.
A few thoughts: first, if Janet chose rush processing in addition to overnight shipping, then this situation truly is unacceptable. One possible explanation is that the mother and the friend live in different parts of the country that are served by different warehouses–living in upstate New York, for example I receive my Newegg shipments out of New Jersey within 48 hours of placing the order, with regular shipping.
Update:Janet just sent Consumerist this update:
Thanks for the advice. I contacted them and got a nice customer service rep. She refunded the entire shipping charge. It shipped today – 3 days after I placed the order (site says 1-2 days). I’m still upset that it took 3 days to ship, but at least I did not pay for extra for it. Thanks!
