S.C. Supreme Court: You Can Get Workers’ Compensation For Company Kickball Injuries

(Fixa.tv)

Sure, you’re a team player, and I don’t mean that only in that annoying officespeak, but during actual sporting events where you play on a team. So what happens if you get injured playing kickball or softball at a company event? One court says employees could be eligible for workers’ compensation in those cases.

The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled today that a worker who shattered two bones in his leg during a company team-building kickball event should get workers’ compensation.

Workers’ comp commissioners in the state had denied his claim at first, as participating in such things is voluntary. An appeals court upheld that ruling, reports the Associated Press, which brought it to the state Supreme Court.

While it’s an employee’s choice to be on a company team and they can show up or not, the court said in ruling for the employee, in this case the worker had worked with his boss to organize the event. Because he was in charge, the game became part of his job — he basically had to be there.

As justices noted, the man’s boss said he would’ve been “surprised and shocked” if he hadn’t showed.

“Although the event may have been voluntary for company employees generally, the undisputed facts unequivocally indicate [the worker] was expected to attend as part of his professional duties,” the court wrote.

Dissenting justices wrote, however, that even though he would’ve had to be there, there’s nothing that said he was required to play.

State court: Workers’ comp OK for kickball injury [The Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Algunas reflexiones sobre los coches sin conductor #infografia #infographic #tech

Hola:

Una infografía con algunas reflexiones sobre los coches sin conductor.

Un saludo

Image by CJ Pony Parts

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Aprende inglés: preposiciones difíciles #infografia #infographic #education

Hola:

Una infografía sobre Aprende inglés: preposiciones difíciles.

Un saludo

[Infographic provided by Grammar.net ]

Archivado en: Aprende inglés, Formación, Infografía Tagged: Aprende inglés, formación, Infografía



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Chipotle CEO Details Why His Company Is Better Than Other “Irrelevant” Fast Food Chains

(Adam Fagen)

Most mega fast food chains are being pulled in two directions these days — trying to satisfy those consumers who want quality ingredients and healthier options, while also pushing bottom-dollar value menu items to diners whose primary goal is to eat something fast and cheap. It would seem like one of these would have to win out in the long run, and according to the co-CEO of Chipotle, the cheap and easy route will soon be a thing of the past.

In an interview with The Street, Chipotle co-CEO Monty Moran says the company is taking down traditional fast food, which he deems “irrelevant,” by opening more locations and showing customers that the other chains don’t care as much about the consumer or their employees.

“By traditional fast food I mean where the predominant goal is the cheapening of the raw ingredients, the automation of the work such that anyone could do it that you don’t need training so that they turn over their employees without any care for them, where it’s a game of value meals and cheapening and cheapening the food experience,” he says.

Another reason Chipotle will contribute to the downfall and replace traditional fast food chains is its emphasis on where food comes from.

“Get suppliers to start thinking how they raise food differently because there are more folks like Chipotle, they will have to do things according to our protocols,” he says. “A fifth way is changing customer perception so that customers are aware where their food comes from and start making demands of grocers and restaurants to provide food in a way that makes sense to them.”

It’s hard to imagine how fast food is irrelevant considering McDonald’s alone is 20-times larger than Chipotle. But even with such a wide gap, Moran says Chipotle will continue leading the way – through its own locations or imitations – in changing the face of fast food.

Chipotle’s Monty Moran Unwraps the Restaurant’s Success Story [The Street]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

A Bunch Of Meanies Are Stealing Corn From Nice People In Connecticut

(PepOMint)

Just because something isn’t sitting in a store with a price tag on it doesn’t mean it’s free, people. Which is why it’s quite rude that big old meanies have been swiping corn at Connecticut corn farms, not because they’re hungry and in need of a snack, but to sell for 100% profit off the back of a truck.

Two recent thefts at farms about 25 miles apart in Connecticut are ticking off the farmers who raise that corn to sell at farm stands in the area for a living, reports the New York Times.

A father and son team have been charged in one of the thefts, after the farmer caught up with them when they fled with their allegedly ill-gotten gains. He says the twosome targeted 40 acres of his family farm that lies outside a locked gate, and worked their way through the rows before he confronted them.

“One was holding the bag, and the other was filling it up,” the fourth-generation farmer said.

They were easy to spot when he caught up with them just before police did.

“They had corn tassels in their hair,” he told the NYT, “A dead giveaway.”

While the two suspects are facing three months in prison and $500 in fines, other farmers in the area say that wouldn’t be the right punishment for the alleged crime.

“Heck, I don’t want these guys to go to jail,” said the sales manager at another farm with an unsolved theft of its own. “I want them to pick weeds on farms for two summers in a row. See how much of an appetite they have for stealing corn after that.”

Farmers suspect that the thieves are swiping the corn and selling it miles away, off the backs of trucks instead of at local markets where everyone knows each other.

It isn’t easy to keep an eye on all those fields, which makes finding the perpetrators tough. For now, some farms are installing surveillance cameras, and trying tricks like planting “cow corn” used to feed animals along the edges to dissuade thefts.

“Eat that and you will never steal corn from there again,” a farmer advised on one of the farms’ Facebook pages.

Crime Where Telltale Clue Is a Corn Tassel [New York Times]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Reminder: If A Store Won’t Sell You A Laptop For $10, It’s Not Bait And Switch

Not $10.

It’s not the fastest or best computer you’ll see, but the laptop that reader J. spotted for sale at her college’s online bookstore was a deal she couldn’t pass up. An AMD E300 processor! 2 gigabytes of ram! A 320 gigabyte hard drive! All this for only $10. She placed an order and waited…only to have her order rudely canceled with no notice.

Here’s the item on the site. J’s college bookstore is run by eFollett, the company that runs all bookstores not already run by Barnes & Noble, or so it seems.

Oddly enough, the item is still on the site, but marked down to only $5, and also not available for actual purchase.

She was able to put the order through, and took a screen grab:

This should have been no surprise whatsoever to anyone whose order was canceled. While it would be awesome to get a $10 laptop, any consumer who knows enough to pounce on that order also knows that this is some kind of error on the retailer’s part. You’re not scamming the company, but you also aren’t placing that order in good faith. Especially if you order multiple computers to re-sell elsewhere. J. didn’t do that in this case, but we read FatWallet, too, and know that it’s something that happens.

People frequently complain that issues like this are “bait and switch,” but we’ve gone over this many times: a transaction isn’t bait and switch when you place an order and the retailer cancels it and refunds your money. For bait and switch to happen, the retailer would have never intended to sell the item to you at all, and then tried to sell you a different item with a lower price and/or fewer features than the low-priced item that served as the “bait.”

Is it annoying when a company offers an amazing price and then snatches your order away? Yes. However, it’s not surprising, and retailers have no obligation to honor a price that they posted in error.

In this case, when you order a $10 laptop, a $25 laptop, a $69 iPad, 14¢ Cheerios, or $16 Copic markers, you are Michael Bluth.

You’re opening a bag that says “Dead dove–do not eat,” somehow expecting to find something other than an inedible dead dove.

It wasn’t very nice of the bookstore to cancel the order out from under J. without even sending her an e-mail, though, and we have contacted Follett to ask about that. We’ll update this post if we hear anything back.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Online Retailer Will Fine You $250 If You Even Threaten To Complain About Purchase

The Terms of Sale on the Accessory Outlet website say you can be fined $250 or more for even threatening to complain about a purchase.

If you were put off by KlearGear.com’s ridiculous “Non-Disparagement” fee, which penalizes customers for sharing their bad shopping experiences with the public, another online retailer is apparently trying to go one further, by not only banning customers from saying bad things online, but by also forbidding them from even bringing up the threat of a complaint or a credit card chargeback.

Buried at the bottom of the Terms page for OnlineAccessoryOutlet.com, you’ll find the following insanely overreaching stipulations (bolded for emphasis):

“You agree not to file any complaint, chargeback, claim, dispute, or make any public forum post, review, Better Business Bureau complaint, social media post, or any public statement regarding the order, our website, or any issue regarding your order, for any reason, within this 90 day period, or to threaten to do so within the 90 day period, or it is a breach of the terms of sale, creating liability for damages in the amount of $250, plus any additional fees, damages – both consequential and incidental, calculated on an ongoing basis.”

The Terms also claim the customer agrees that, even after the 90 days are up, the “sole method of dispute resolution in all cases… shall be binding arbitration to take place in New York City, with all expenses paid by the respective parties.”

So if your purchase is late, lost, damaged, broken, etc., and you even make the vague statement of “I’m going to write about this on Facebook” or “I’m going to call my bank to cancel this charge,” Accessory Outlet will tag you for $250. And even if you wait the full 90 days for that period to end, the only way to resolve the issue is by traveling — at your own expense — to New York City for an arbitration hearing.

And this is apparently neither a joke nor an exaggerated policy made in the hope that someone will be too scared of the fine to complain.

One Accessory Outlet customer in Wisconsin was fined the $250 for telling the retailer that she would issue a chargeback on her credit card because the $40 iPhone case she’d ordered hadn’t arrived after 10 days. And then when she refused to pay that fine, it was sent to collections.

The customer has sued Accessory Outlet in a New York state court, arguing that the $250 “debt” she is now being hassled over is bogus. According to the complaint [PDF], the “terms are unenforceable, both because they are unconscionable as a matter of law and because [the Plaintiff] never agreed to them.”

That last claim is the most obvious and the easiest to prove. Though the Terms are on the Accessory Outlet website, at no point in the purchase process is the customer required to check a box or otherwise acknowledge that the Terms have been read. We attempted to verify the Plaintiff’s claim by going all the way through the ordering process (up until actually hitting the “complete purchase” button, of course) and could not find any place in which it was even suggested that we read the Terms before placing an order.

According to the customer, she placed her order on July 6 of this year. Four days later, she received an e-mail saying her order had shipped. The customer then checked the supposed USPS tracking number of her order and found that it had not been received by the Postal Service.

When the item had not been received by July 16, she contacted the company via its website and requested that the order be canceled. Accessory Outlet replied that it could not be canceled because it had shipped.

The customer checked the USPS tracking number again and then replied to Accessory Outlet that she would be requesting a chargeback from her credit card company because she believed the retailer was lying about whether the order had actually shipped.

This is when they told her about the $250 fine that she hadn’t agreed to.

The company told her in an e-mail that not only would she be hit for the $250 penalty but that her account would be sent to a collections agency, which would “put a negative mark on your credit for 7 years and will also result in calls to you home and/or work.”

Accessory Outlet also threatened her with the prospect of “additional fees for any correspondence with your card issuer… billed to you on an hourly basis and a flat rate $50 fee for the dispute or claim.”

When the customer replied that she had the right to contact her credit card company, the retailer replied that she now owed them “damages” and that her account would be referred to “multiple collections agencies.”

After receiving additional, similar e-mails from Accessory Outlet, the customer responded that she was getting a lawyer.

To which the retailer replied:

“Contact your lawyer, spend more time and money if you wish. You will be billed and the amount we bill you for will continue to rise with every email and every second we dedicate o correspondence of any kind pertaining to your breach of the terms of sale. Thank you.”

A subsequent e-mail from Accessory Outlet personally attacks the customer and closes on a menacing tone:

“Read the agreement or have someone competent do so for you since your emails make it clear you did not read the agreement or do not understand the clauses contained therein. You obviously do not know how to use the tracking or are ignoring it… You are playing games with the wrong people and have made a very bad mistake given the legally binding contract we have in place. One we have successfully enforced on many individuals the same we will do with you.”

The customer eventually received her order — nine days after it supposedly shipped — and claims it was defective and unusable. Her complaints to Accessory Outlet received no response.

She seeks to have her alleged debts voided because she did not actively agree to the Terms of Sale, nor was she required to view them. Additionally, the customer claims the terms are unreasonably favorable to Accessory Outlet.

“I want to go online and warn other customers about Accessory Outlet’s unfair terms and shoddy products,” said the customer in a statement. “But I’m afraid Accessory Outlet will claim I owe it more money and try to ruin my credit.”

“Accessory Outlet is using unfair terms hidden in fine print, along with threatening emails, to bully a customer into keeping quiet about her bad experience with the company,” said Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case. “But terms that prevent a customer from speaking publicly about her transaction and from contacting her credit card company are unreasonable and unenforceable.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Heat Wave Leaves Hundreds Of Thousands Of Tomatoes To Rot Stinkily In Fields

Live rotting tomato coverage! (Fox2Now)

Sure, farming can be stinky business. There are all those acres in need of fertilizer, after all, making things grow. But it’s an overdose of tomatoes that’s making fields stink to high heaven in Illinois, just south of St. Louis, Mo.

The usually delicious, delectable fruits grew like crazy this year, reports Fox2Now, which at first was a good thing for the farmer. But after a few weeks of plentiful tomatoes, everyone had their fill.

“If you grow in high volume and they all come at one time with full moon, there’s no way you can control them. You either have too many or you don’t have enough,” the farmer explained. “It’s a perishable item. That’s why vegetable growing is kind of tricky. It’s supply and demand.”

Then came a heat wave — zapping the tomatoes more quickly than workers could pick them, he added.

That’s left somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tomatoes rotting on the vine, with the stink caught by the heat. And it’s been too hot to get workers out there to clean it up, bringing in the flies and all the smells.

“It smelled just like swamp,” said one passerby who was out walking with her daughter. “Once we turned the corner (the smell) definitely took us over.”

Despite the locals pinching their noses, the farmer says he can’t do much about the stench for now.

“We’ll put the mower in them, mow them down, get the fields cleaned up, get the plastic picked up… I don’t think the odor is that bad. It’s better than cabbage, put it that way,” he added.

Hundreds of thousands of tomatoes left to rot in field [Fox2Now]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Tim Hortons: Nice To Meet You, America! Have A Buffalo Crunch Doughnut

(@AsEatenOnTV on Twitter)

You might’ve heard that Burger King is merging with Tim Hortons, a restaurant chain based in Canada. But because many Americans might not be as familiar with the company, Tim Hortons is offering a sort of “howdy do!” from our neighbors to the north, apparently, by way of a “Buffalo Crunch” doughnut.

Perhaps because we all look like a bunch of frankenfood enthusiasts, what with our cronuts and biznuts and whatnots, Tim Hortons is bringing a thing that appears to be dough combined with buffalo sauce to the New York State Fair right now, reports GrubStreet, as spotted first(ish) by @AsEatenOnTV on Twitter.

Jumping into frankenfood territory and not looking back, Tim Hortons’ pull-apart yeast doughnut is dunked in Buffalo sauce and sprinkled with crushed chips, with a handful of corn-chip strips in the middle for decoration.

And just like wings, the doughnuts come in mild and hot varieties, with ranch dressing on the side, because if there’s a condiment we Americans love, it’s ranch dressing. Unlike wings, these pastries don’t contain any meat, however. The doughnut goes for $2, not to mention the cost to your soul for having eaten such a thing.

Again, this thing is only at the New York State Fair… at least, for now. But put it between a bun and we could be looking at the future of the Burger King/Tim Hortons marriage. Please don’t do that, though, Canada.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Seven Crumbs Locations To Reopen Next Month With The Addition Of Non-Cupcake Treats

If the closure of Crumbs Bake Shop last month left a cupcake sized hole in your heart, you may be able to fill that void next month as the new company operators prepare to reopen at least seven locations.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey gave its stamp of approval to a joint venture to acquire Crumbs’ assets in exchange for the cancelation of $6.5 million in debt.

Just a week after Crumbs shuttered its stores in early July, Marcus Lemonis, star of reality TV’s The Profit, and snack-maker Fischer Enterprises announced plans to use the Crumbs name to sell their own non-Crumbs’ retail products – as well as the once-popular cupcakes.

Before anyone can consider the new joint venture the savior of Crumbs, the WSJ reports that court filings show Fischer Enterprises had actually provided a $5 million investment to Crumbs in January, but the out-of-court restructure never took place resulting in Crumbs entering bankruptcy.

Following Tuesday’s court approval, Scott Fischer, COO of Fischer Enterprises, announced that the company will reopen about two dozen Crumbs locations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Washington D.C.

Seven of those locations will reopen next month and the rest in the months following, but don’t expect to find any in your area mall. Under the restructuring plan, all mall locations in the Northeast will remain closed.

The stores will have a decidedly different appearance than those consumers previously visited. Although Crumbs cupcakes will still be prominently displayed, the shops will incorporate other food brands owned by the new investors. A full list of offered treats hasn’t been released, but Fischer Enterprises owns Dippin’ Dots, Doc Popcorn, Mr. Green Tea Ice cream, and Sweet Pete’s Candy, while Lemonis has stake in several other dessert companies.

Crumbs Bake Shop to Reopen Stores After Court Approval [The Wall Street Journal]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist