Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
Consumer reader Jackie says her one-year-old Seth was so put off by Santa he wouldn’t even make turn his head to look, while big brother Rylan appears to see the benefits of being nice to the big guy.
We’d like to thank all our generous readers who sent in photos this year — and if you don’t see yours below, it might just have been too small for the collection so feel free to send it in next year. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and all other kinds of warm feelings to you all. Take it away, kids.
Annie, 23 months: “Christmas chaos,” writes mom Mari.
Benji, 1: “We were blindsided because Benji normally loves strangers and regularly approaches and hugs random people,” explains his mom, Karin.
Jack, 4, and his sister, Helena, 1: “Jack is holding Helena’s hand to protect her from the big guy,” says mom Jennifer. “Or he may just be encouraging her to stop crying so they can both get presents.
Ruby, 6 months: “This is Ruby being scared of Santa,” writes mom Lindsey.
Lucas, 3 and Nora, 1: “Can’t really see Nora, but that’s the beauty of it!” says mom Sarah.
Michael, 11 months: “Eleven months old and his first Christmas why would he scream like that?” writes mom Cindy. “It’s not like I’m handing him over to a complete stranger dressed in bright red and with long white whiskers…. oh wait, oops my bad.”
Emily, 11 months, Hannah, 3: “My wife got this a week or so ago while she was shopping,” writes dad Todd. “Sums up our house pretty well.”
Billy Fred, 1 year and one month: “He was perfectly fine while we waited in line but once I put him in Santa’s hands the world had ended,” his mom Becca writes. “They snapped a few pictures and when I picked him up he was completely fine. It was like I never put him down!”
Jackson, 1: “This is his first visit with Santa Claus at a special fundraiser for the Junior League of Portland – I guess he thought we were feeding him to the wolves or something awful – it’s really a shame there’s no audio with the photo….”
Frankie, 3 and Eloise, 1: “We spent about 15 minutes chatting with Santa,” mom Amy explains. “Frankie got a little more brave, but Eloise looked suspicious the whole time. She was not having it. At least she didn’t vomit on him like Frankie did on her gingerbread house.”
Harper, 6 months: “She is 6 months old and absolutely hates Santa Claus,” her mom Brittney writes. “This her second time sitting on his lap and without fail, she screams. Santa doesn’t look like he’s too thrilled about the experience either.”
Ryan Jr., 6 months
Finn, 17 months: “This is as close as he got to sitting in Santa’s lap,” writes his mom Teresa. “We did get some fair photos with him sitting on the armrest though.”
Evelyn, 17 months: “She promised us ‘I no scream at Santa, mommy!’ ” writes her mom Amy. “Well, she clearly lied to us!”
Charlie-Nadine, 3 months: “Gotta love their first Christmas!” her mom says.
Otto, 2, visiting Santa last year: “He was absolutely excited and thrilled – until the very last minute, when he began to freak out and clutched his lollipop for dear life,” his parents Dan and Kalee write. “We just took him to Santa this year, and he’s over the fear, though he still didn’t quite understand why Santa didn’t have the presents he asked for on the spot…”
Hannah, 6, Joseph, 3 and Sarah, 18 months: “Sarah, the little screamer, was 18 months,” explains dad Joe. “She did NOT want to be there.”
Tyler: “Santa. The S in PTSD,” writes Tyler’s dad Mike.
Penelope, 8 months: “She HATED sitting on Santa’s lap,” her dad Benjamin says. “That’s her brother Everett sitting next to her.”
Madison, 2: “No story, just a great fear of the man in red,” her dad Justin explains.
Emma, 10 months and Logan, 23 months: “As soon as we pulled Logan off Santa’s lap she looked at me and said, ‘I Logan Santa fun.’ I asked her, ‘You thought seeing Santa was fun?’ ” her mom Laura says. “‘ Yes!’ she replied. Looks like a fun time, eh?”
Phyla, 1 and a half.
Sophia, 13 months: “She was hyperventilating for a good 10 minutes after this traumatic experience until Grandma could calm her down,” her mom Sarah explains.
Nathan, 2: “He wanted nothing to do with Santa and Mommys’ demon eyes make it that much funnier,” his mom Erica jokes.
Sunshine, 11: “This ‘child’ is not human but I thought it might fit for your photo gallery, especially since, well, everyone loves a Corgi!” his mom Amy writes. “This pic was taken at a fundraiser for the Louisiana SPCA. I’m pretty obsessed with my dog but I am not quite crazy enough to take her to see Santa if it’s not for charity!”
Claire, 6 and Olivia, 2: “This photo is from 2007 at a church Christmas breakfast in Moses Lake, Washington,” dad Nathan writes.
Mason, 1 and Olivia, 3: “They were not fans of Santa this year!” writes mom Kaitlin.
I vaguely remember that day planners are what people once used to organize their lives before they used smartphones for that kind of thing. Apparently, no one in Jim’s town has had any need for one since 2009, so no one has noticed that they still have planners in stock from 2009.
He had to snap this picture quickly, but the information is all there: day planner, for mothers, and this photo was not taken on the clearance rack in February of 2009.
Parents often say that they’d like to relive their kids’ early years: maybe this is a tool for that.
The reader says his PetSmart has an arrangement with the local animal shelter that allows the shelter to place its rescued kittehs at the store so as to improve their chances of being adopted.
“Volunteers come twice a day to feed, clean their litter, and play with them,” he explains. “During holidays, when PetSmart is closed, a store employee would come in to feed the fish and a volunteer would also come in for the cats.”
However, he says that PetSmart HQ has decided that no one is to come in between the store closing on Tuesday night and its re-opening on Thursday morning.
Some cat owners have no problem leaving their feline friends alone at home for a day or two, provided there is ample food, water and clean litter. Of course, one could argue that there is a big difference between leaving a cat alone in a house or an apartment, where it’s free to roam about and entertain itself, as opposed to being stuck in a small pet store cage.
We’ve reached out to PetSmart to see what the company’s policy is regarding care of in-store pets on Christmas and will update if we hear back, but we wanted to get readers’ opinions on the matter:
You might recognize the rings for sale in the Taco Bell Gift Shop when the company sent rings to a variety of famous pretty ladies with Twitter accounts. Now ordinary people can have the same wire jewelry mailed to glamorous models, except that we have to pay $25 for the set and look like plain old boring lumps while we wear them. From my computer at least, it’s not possible to add this “Limited Time Offer” to our web carts. That’s probably just as well.
Profits from store sales apparently go to the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens. Actual slogan: “To inspire and enable teens to achieve MAS.”
Live Más Store [Official Site] (via Brand Eating)
“We were constantly told we would end up working for McDonald’s,” one former branch manager from Florida tells the L.A. Times. “If we did not make the sales quotas … we had to stay for what felt like after-school detention, or report to a call session on Saturdays.”
She says she resigned in 2010 rather than deal with the required hourly sales updates from regional managers, and the dangling threat of termination for those employees who failed to meet quotas.
Wells Fargo averages more than 6 financial products per household — several times the national average — but even that isn’t enough, with bank brass reportedly urging employees to shoot for the “Great 8,” meaning that each household would have bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and just about anything else you could get from a Wells Fargo branch.
To some, that pressure and the dread of losing their jobs led them to make bad, and sometimes illegal decisions. In addition to opening up duplicate accounts, one of the 30 Wells employees dismissed in October tells the Times that people at the bank used a company database to identify customers to pre-order credit cards for customers who had been pre-approved.
“They’d just tell the customers: ‘You’re getting a credit card,’” explains the former employee, who said that when customers would complain about the unasked-for cards, a manager would just chalk it up to a computer glitch.
Another former branch manager tells the Times she learned that some of her employees had talked a homeless woman into opening six different accounts, all just to meet quotas, when the woman only needed a single account in order to get her Social Security benefits direct-deposited.
“It’s all manipulation. We are taught exactly how to sell multiple accounts,” says the former manager, who helped the customer close all her unnecessary accounts. “It sounds good, but in reality it doesn’t benefit most customers.”
About the pressure from Wells HQ, she adds, “If you do not make your goal, you are severely chastised and embarrassed in front of 60-plus managers in your area by the community banking president.”
For its part, Wells maintains that it does have a focus on selling products to customers but disagrees with the notion of a boiler-room sales culture.
“This is something we take very seriously,” a rep for the bank tells the Times. “When we find lapses, we do something about it, including firing people.”
He also points out that most employees receive relatively little of their pay from bonuses, with only around 3% of tellers’ annual pay tied to sales goals.
But that may be a short-sighted viewpoint, as it assumes that these bad employees are behaving unethically out of greed.
If I work at a store and my boss tells me I need to sell $500 worth of widgets each day or I’m fired, it makes no difference to me whether I earn commission on those widgets. By telling an employee that his or her job is on the line, a boss is letting it be known that 100% of that employee’s wages are on the line, not just the small percentage tied to sales goals.
Dear Dunkin’ Donuts, if you’re going to make the push for sausage as teh new bacon, you’ll have to do something more appealing than this. (Morton Fox)
“Sausage will be the new bacon,” Stan Frankenthaler, Executive Chef and VP of Product Innovation at Dunkin’ Brands, tells QSRweb.com about his predictions for the upcoming year in fast food. “This includes seeing sausage pop up in new and interesting ways, and also seeing different types of flavors of sausage being offered more broadly, from the traditional pork sausage to other varieties, such as turkey sausage, infused with different spices and ingredients.”
May we suggest the following:
•Sausage fries: They look like french fried potatoes, but are really just sausage
•Sausage burger: No, not replacing the beef patty in a hamburger with sausage, but using sausage patties as the buns. It’s like the KFC Double Down but with an extra layer of meat.
•Turduckensausage: Cook a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey inside a massive sausage casing.
It was just last week that customers received an update that promised the tablets would be zipping out of the warehouse any minute now. Many customers probably received their tablets after that, but they aren’t the ones complaining to us and burning up Groupon’s Facebook page.
About a week ago, customers who had ordered the tablets received this message:
We know you’re on the lookout for it, so we wanted to give you an update on your order’s status. Although it may be arriving slightly later than expected, rest assured that you’ll get it before December 25-we’re even strapping some jetpacks on our reindeer to make up for lost time.
Maybe it was after sending that e-mail that Groupon learned that jetpacks aren’t a real thing. The message instilled false hope, which is why consumers were even angrier to receive their cancellation notices. The e-mail was blunt and chatty, and the company offered a $50 credit to customers stuck in this situation.
We know this is disappointing. In fact, it’s downright unacceptable, and we couldn’t be more sorry for the trouble. Failing to deliver as promised is something we take very seriously, and we’re especially sorry this happened so close to the holidays.
We don’t want to leave you without a gift at the last minute, so we’ve given you $50 to use before the end of the year on another deal that you can print or email instantly. Just sign into your account with this email address and choose any one of our 1,000s of giftable deals, and the $50 is yours.
The catch is that credit has to be used in ten days.
For customers who planned to give the tablet as a gift, an inkjet-printed voucher for a 1-hour hot stone massage doesn’t really compare to a Nexus 7, does it?
“So Groupon holds onto our money for 3 weeks,” reader Christian wrote to Consumerist, “sends us a reassuring email a week ago, and then cancels the item so close to Christmas that we are all in a scramble to find a replacement item.” Yes, that’s pretty much it. It would be nice if the tablets were still coming, just slightly after Christmas. That’s not the case. No tablet is coming. The $50 is nice, but not helpful when you’re depending on that gift to arrive by a certain date.
We contacted Groupon to find out whether they had an updated statement on this situation: they don’t yet. We’ll let you know when we hear anything.
So if you’ve got a TV commercial in mind — or an advertising trend, or a piece of music that has been used in too many commercials — shoot us an e-mail at tips@consumerist.com with “WAIA2013″ in the headline.
Feel free to go into vitriolic detail about why you are particularly annoyed by the ad(s) you’re nominating, as it might help push your suggestion into the spotlight (where it will be quickly pelted with rotten fruit).
Send us those nominations by the end of day on Friday, Dec. 27!
According to the NY Post, a woman in Staten Island sent an anonymous letter to the NY State Liquor Authority, complaining, “My husband spends all his money on these pools and not on our children,” and asking how the SLA could allow a bar to operate what she claimed was a $1 million illegal football pool.
The Authority must have been moved by her letter, as it quickly sent investigators to snap photos of the pool boards — indicating who had purchased which boxes in each pool — taped to the mirrored wall behind the bar.
The total prize value of the pools wasn’t $1 million, but it was still pretty substantial. Four pools were set to pay out $50,000 each to their winners, another two were worth $100,000 each and the largest pool discovered by SLA investigators was worth $200,000. Of course, to win that prize you’d have to pay $2,000 per chance.
While NY state law forbids any gambling on the premises of an establishment with liquor license, one insider at the SLA tells the Post that shutting down operations like this isn’t about curbing illegal football pools, but about fattening the authority’s coffers.
“It’s really a victimless crime, but a money-making operation for the SLA,” the insider alleges. “The fines are substantial considering the severity of the violation.”
