We’ve all been there, the utter disappointment of having your candy bar stuck in the evil teeth of a vending machine. The sweet treat hanging by a thread, mocking you from the top rows. How far are you willing to go to satisfy your sweet tooth? For one Iowa man scoring his treat cost him a job.
It all started last fall when the man put a dollar in his company’s vending machine to procure a Twix bar, The Des Moines Register reports.
Unfortunately, the candy bar was snagged by a spiral hook on its journey through the machine.
Not one to be deterred, the man pounded the machine and then shook it back and forth in an attempt to dislodge his snack.
When those methods didn’t work, the man took a more sure-fire approach. He used an 8,000-pound forklift to lift the machine 2 feet from the floor before letting it drop. According to unemployment compensation records he repeated the move six times and eventually dislodged three candy bars.
When confronted by a supervisor, the man allegedly said he was trying to get the candy bar he paid for.
He was fired five days later.
A claim for unemployment benefits was denied when a judge found the man had demonstrated a willful disregard for his employer’s interests. The former employee contends he used the forklift to simply place the machine back in its original spot after shaking it with his hands.
The man told The Des Moines Register that he heard the company now has new vending machines.
Paul Navestad aka Paul Richard aka Paul Richard Jones was one of two operators of the same that made more than 8 million robocalls, including at least 2.7 million calls to consumers on the National Do Not Call Registry.
Recipients of these calls were told they had qualified for “cash grants” worth up to $25,000 from federal, state, and local governments, private foundations, and “wealthy individuals.” They were then directed to requestagrant.com, where they were referred to sites that charged a fee for basic info on how to apply for grants, a process that is not exactly quick and easy.
As part of the $30 million deal in 2012, Navestad agreed to pay a $20 million penalty and fork over $1.1 million in money he’d received as part of the scam. Sucks for him, but better than going to jail, right?
Apparently not to Navestad/Richard/Jones, who was recently held in contempt of court by a federal judge who found that the scam artist had ignored his part of the FTC bargain.
Authorities believe he’s fled the U.S. and is living overseas. The court has ordered his arrest upon his return to the United States and his incarceration until he pays the money due.
From the Global Department Of Studies That Tell Us What We Already Knew, a recent study of online retail data shows that while retail spending is down overall, shoppers spent more money online in January 2014 than in January 2013. What could the reason be? Well, speculates the company that did the study, maybe it’s because of the run of really crappy weather in highly populated areas of the country in 2014.
After all, if you can’t go to work and you notice that your favorite boots aren’t so waterproof anymore while shoveling out your parking space, how do do you remedy the situation? You make a cup of tea and surf over to Zappos.
They didn’t spell this out in their blog post about the study, but Ecommercebytes asked Custora what the causes of current shopping trends might be. “One may assume the inclement weather in major parts of the country since the beginning of the year is making more consumers inclined to stay indoors and shop from the comfort of their home,” a spokesperson said.
Good news for online retailers: not as good for the brick-and-mortar kind. Or for the delivery personnel who must forge through treacherous driveways in order to bring us our boots.
While you might be the kind of person who prefers a couple lumps in your mashed potatoes, any lump that’s hard and feels like a bit of plate is an unwelcome addition. That’s what a man suing Outback Steakhouse in Oregon is claiming: He says he broke two teeth as he bit into mashed potatoes at the restaurant.
He’s suing the restaurant for $48,000, claiming that there were pieces of broken porcelain in his food, reports The Oregonian.
Two of his molars cracked during the bite back in February 2012, he says in his lawsuit, and when his waitress alerted her managers, they “admitted to plaintiff that a plate had broken in the kitchen and that pieces had fallen into the mashed potatoes.”
In his lawsuit he faults the restaurant group that runs the location for not throwing out the potatoes that received the shattered plate treatment. The suit also says management was negligent in failing to tell customers that a dish had broken and let them “make their own informed decision regarding whether to eat food that might contain sharp, hard, dangerous and potentially deadly pieces of a broken plate.”
Because of course, your average person would simply say, “Gee, thanks, but I’ll take the smoothest potatoes you can find and without dish chunks, please.”
One of the managing partners of that group says he’s never heard of something like this happening, and that safety is very important.
“It’s really disappointing when someone gets hurt inside the restaurant,” he said.
This is not an uncommon sight in Philadelphia during the winter. (Twitter: @NoSavesies)
Readers who’ve only lived in warm climates or areas with ample parking don’t understand the special hell that is going through the effort of digging your car out of a plowed-in curbside parking spot, knowing all the while that said spot will soon be occupied by someone else’s car. That’s where some people employ the controversial practice of using chairs, traffic cones, handmade signs, trash cans, and apparently ironing boards, to “save” their shoveled-out spots for later.
There are two issues surrounding this traditional spot-saving ritual: First, is it legal? Second, regardless of legality, do you have some sort of tacit right to that spot?
“Just because a practice has been going on for so long that [it] has been ignored, doesn’t mean that we need to continue to do so,” explains Philadelphia police sergeant Eric Gripp, who also created the @NoSavesies Twitter account and hashtag, to the Philadelphia Daily News.
Gripp says that there aren’t laws on the books in Philly that specifically forbid the practice of saving a spot with a lawnchair or whatever other piece of furniture you’re wiling to risk losing by putting it in the vacated spot. However, there are laws against littering and obstructing the roadway.
That said, cops — not just in Philly, but in other cities where this is a common practice — tend to not issue citations to spot-savers, presumably because it’s hard to locate the owner of some random, busted folding chair left sitting in the gutter.
Instead, says Gripp, he and his fellow officers are more frequently called to handle the fights that erupt over saved spots, or from people like visiting nurse services who can’t find a parking spot because entire blocks are littered with bits of furniture.
Since I haven’t had a car in more than 15 years and my street in Philly is so narrow you can’t actually park on it, this issue doesn’t impact me. And so I took the question to my colleagues who own cars and/or have lived in snowy cities.
Ms. Kate Cox is now working in Consumerist’s D.C. office, but she’d previously lived in Boston where she says spot-saving has “always been considered a total [expletive redacted] move,” but “everyone does it anyway.”
Mary Beth Quirk sees her fair share of snow in Brooklyn, but not as much as she did growing up in Wisconsin. She feels that spot-saving might be accept under two conditions:
“If you (A) did the shoveling, and (B) are sitting in the chair, the spot is yours,” MBQ explains. “But the traffic cone thing? That’s bad. I’ll just drive over it.”
Meanwhile, Meg Marco, who has come across spot-saving during her time in both Chicago and NYC, worries about those who might unwittingly find themselves in a saved-spot dispute because of some other jerk’s actions:
“Say the first guy shovels his car out in the morning and leaves a cruddy chair there, hoping his spot will still be free when he returns. Then an hour later, a second guy comes, scoffs at the chair and tosses it out of the way. So after that guy leaves and a third driver pulls up to find an empty, shoveled-out, unclaimed spot, she might be the one getting yelled at when the first driver returns home to find her car in the spot he shoveled out that morning.”
And D.C.’s Ashlee Keiser, formerly of Iowa, apparently adopts the same double standard held by most spot-savers: “If the spot was being saved for me: acceptable. If it was being saved for someone else: illegal,” she jokes (I hope). “Honestly, if there’s not a person there guarding the spot, then I’d consider it fair game.”
Albany’s own Laura Northrup sums it up by saying, “In an ideal world, it would be illegal to save the spot for any longer than it takes to go get your car from wherever it is. In a real world where law enforcement has to make real rules, if no one is actually standing in the spot then it should be fair game.”
This is a very complicated matter… You know, a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what-have-you’s. Which is why we’re putting it to y’all to make the call:
Loosen those laces and get ready to slip off your sandals: Travelers flying into the United States will likely find their footwear under closer scrutiny after the Department of Homeland Security warned airlines about a possible new shoe-bomb threat.
Officials told the airlines to perk up and stay alert on flights heading from overseas into the U.S., with several sources telling NBC News that “very recent intelligence” showed credible warnings of possible attempts to attack planes using explosives concealed in shoes.
There’s no specific threat to any certain airline, country or time, or any confirmed plot, officials say. But Homeland Security thought it was best to let airlines in on the possible danger anyway. One official told NBC that the concern that comes with this news is “moderate.”
“It’s a reminder that we are under constant threat and an advisory to airlines be on their A game,” said another official familiar with the threat intelligence.
This also has nothing to do with the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, officials say.
“Out of an abundance of caution, DHS regularly shares relevant information with domestic and international partners about relevant threat information as we work to meet our mission of keeping the traveling public safe,” the Department said. “These types of regular communications are part of that important priority.
“Our security apparatus includes a number of measures, both seen and unseen, informed by the latest intelligence and as always DHS continue to adjust security measures to fit an ever evolving threat environment.”
You’ll recall The Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, whose attempt to blow up explosives in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2002 is the reason why we all take our shoes off in airport security screenings now. And it sounds like the shadow he cast on our footwear is going to last for a very long time yet.
Like scalpers who drop their asking prices as game time approaches, black market sellers of credit card numbers stolen during last December’s massive data breach at Target are now offering this ill-gotten information at rock-bottom prices.
Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs has been following the asking price of these cards on underground online marketplaces and found that the purloined numbers are now selling for a fraction of what they were going for in December.
On Wednesday, sellers on one such marketplace sold nearly 3 million stolen card numbers, getting anywhere from $8 to $28 per card.
By contrast, card info stolen from Target shoppers was selling for between $27 and $45 on the day the news of the hack broke back in mid-December.
Why the steep drop in value? Because the odds of those numbers still being valid has dropped significantly. At the time of the breach announcement, sellers were claiming 100% “valid rates,” meaning that all the cards in a bundle would work if used right away for an illegal shopping spree.
But the cards currently being sold only have stated valid rates of 60%, meaning there is a pretty good chance that four out of 10 cards purchased have already been canceled or flagged.
It’s kind of like buying a day-old baguette at the baker. Maybe it’ll be fine, but there’s a decent chance it will be stale.
It’s surprising to us that so many people have still not canceled cards that were included in the Target breach. Just because your credit card offers $0 liability on fraudulent purchases doesn’t mean you should continue to be in a position where you’re constantly checking your card activity for questionable purchases.
The LP has survived the 8-track, the cassette tape, the CDs, the MP3, and streaming audio. But will all that vinyl have a place to live now that IKEA is killing off collectors’ beloved Expedit shelving units?
If you or someone you know has a substantial record collection, there’s a good chance you have encountered a few Expedits. The dimensions are ideal for storing and arranging LPs; the no-frills design is unassuming and can fit in just about anywhere, and the shelves are sturdy enough to handle the weight of thousands of records (at least when you follow the directions and don’t turn the units on their sides).
But after vinyl lovers got wind of the impending death of the Expedit, there was an outcry of analog outrage on social media, with one “save the Expedit” Facebook group already counting more than 18,000 members.
There are claims on the never-hyperbolic Twittersphere (a word I hate myself for typing) that there has been a run on Expedit shelves at IKEA stores. However, I just did a spot-check of availability at stores around the country and couldn’t find one where the shelves were listed as likely to be out of stock; not even in vinyl-loving Brooklyn, where I’ve seen tiny apartments made even tinier by floor-to-ceiling Expedits on multiple walls.
The retailer says it will continue to sell the Expedit until it runs out of stock, but hopes record collectors will be equally pleased with the Kallax shelves it plans to release on April 1.
The Kallax has rounded edges and the sides are slightly thinner than the Expedit, but IKEA is assuring customers (in German) that the interior dimensions of the shelves will remain the same LP-friendly dimensions and that the skinnier exterior walls will still provide adequate support for folks’ cherished vinyl library.
While lawmakers argue about the possible benefits and risks of raising the federal minimum wage by more than 25%, the CEO of Gap Inc. says it will gradually increase its lowest wage tier to $10 an hour over the next two years.
“[A]fter many months of consideration, we’ve made a business decision that’s right for our brands, good for our people and beneficial to our customers,” writes Gap head honcho Glenn Murphy, who said the company has notified employees that the minimum hourly rate is increasing to nine dollars in 2014, with the additional dollar-per-hour coming next year.
More precisely, those wage changes will go into effect in June of their respective years.
The pay increase will initially only happen in the U.S. In total, this will mean a slight pay bump for around 65,000 in-store employees for the retailer, which also includes Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta, Piperlime, and Intermix.
“To us, this is not a political issue,” says Murphy. “Our decision to invest in frontline employees will directly support our business, and is one that we expect to deliver a return many times over.”
In an FAQ about the decision, the retailer explains that “a customer’s lasting impression is often shaped by the interactions with the people in our stores,” adding that in an age where more and more shoppers do their buying online — including those who shop at the various Gap websites — it’s more important than ever that the company “must attract and retain great talent.”
The Gap announcement comes the same day that Walmart revealed that, unlike many of its big box counterparts, it has not yet made a decision on the White House proposal to increase the federal minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $10.10.
The nation’s largest retailer says it is trying to figure out which will have the more significant impact on the economy — the additional money paid to low-wage employees or the predicted loss of jobs that would result from companies that can not afford to pay all the higher wage to their existing workers.
