7-Eleven Teaming Up With P90X Guy To Offer Food That Isn’t A Microwaved Burrito

(scrappy!)

Full disclosure: I have absolutely zero problems with microwaved burritos. Heck, I even love places that have those hot dogs that go around and around in the plastic case. But because some people might want a healthier option at their local convenience stores, 7-Eleven is testing a bunch of healthier options at some Southern California stores, with the help of the guy who created the P90X fitness regime.

A new line touted by 7-Eleven as including “nutritionally balanced” food like fresh sandwiches and salads, as well as cold-pressed juices, will hit 104 stores in the Los Angeles area, reports USA Today, marketed with Tony Horton Kitchen’s name.

But don’t worry, my fellow burrito lovers — this isn’t a case of out with the old, in with the new. All of the old products you’re used to seeing will still be available, just with other choices now.

“We can provide a convenient way for healthy and fitness-oriented consumers to fuel their daily lives,” says Raja Doddala, senior director for innovation at 7-Eleven.

Example menu items: a grilled chicken sandwich with blueberry mustard on a whole-grain sub, a spicy quinoa salad with chimichurri dressing and vegetable wraps. All told, the average calorie count for the new offerings is about 360, with lots of dietary fiber and protein as well.

Whether or not you walk out of that store with a hot dog and a candy bar or a salad and juice, well, that’s anyone’s guess.

7-Eleven tests ‘healthy’ fresh food by fitness guru [USA Today]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Labatt Turning 100-Foot Grain Silos Into World’s Largest Six-Pack

(Labatt USA)

What’s that, in the distance, looming over the horizon like the answer to all of Homer Simpson’s hopes and dreams? It’s a ginormous six-pack of beer, or so six 100-foot grain silos near Buffalo, N.Y. will appear after Labatt is done wrapping them in blue vinyl.

The cluster of silos is part of a former grain mill operation, and were given a makeover recently to fix’em up and get them ready to turn into what’s being called the “largest six-pack in the world,” reports The Buffalo News. It’s unclear if that’s official, considering there’s not actually beer inside.

The co-owner of Buffalo RiverWorks, is planning to use one of the silos for its connected brewery, which won’t actually make Labatte Blue or any other Labatt beer.

“One of the silos will be used to store the grain needed for the brewery operation,” Doug Swift explains. “We’re using a silo as a silo. Go figure.”

So why get Labatt involved? Advertising revenue: Swift says the money from that will go toward building the brewery, which will cost about $750,000. He hasn’t said how much Labatte was willing to fork over to create its giant blue homage, but it doesn’t have to stay that forever.

“The whole thing can be easily removed, and the process is reversible,” Swift said. “If anyone was to decide to return the silo to its original look, it would be very easy to do.”

Now that we’ve got the world’s largest bottle of catsup, the longest bratwurst, and the biggest bowl of moco loco, all we need is the world’s biggest armchair to kick back in and relax with the largest six-pack. I sense a great theme park idea — “GIANT STUFF!”

World’s largest six-pack taking shape at silos on waterfront [The Buffalo News]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

When Consumer Complains About Sexist Socks, Don’t Question The Airflow To Her Genitals

The math-hating socks at the heart of this story.

When you own a business, especially one that sells supposedly sassy socks and other items with humorous quips on them, you have to expect the occasional complaint when an attempt at humor goes over like a lead balloon. And even though you disagree with a person’s gripe, it’s best if you don’t accidentally forward her an internal e-mail calling her a “crazy bitch” and then follow it up with a message telling her to un-bunch her panties to “get some air up there.”

But this is apparently what happened to blogger and math teacher Cindy when she complained to a company called BlueQ about a pair of their socks with a design that reads “The three things I hate the most are math.”

Cindy wrote in detail about her problems with these socks, which only appear to be targeted to females, as they seem to further the ill-informed, outdated notion that women and math don’t mix.

“I hate everything you stand for and your stupid, ugly, antifeminist, socks,” she wrote. “Especially the math one.”

BlueQ could have simply ignored this complaint or sent back a polite, “We’re sorry that you feel this way” e-mail and that probably would have been the end of it.

But the response, as documented in a follow-up post on Cindy’s blog, attempts to counter the anger in her complaint with some nastiness of its own.

“We’re always receptive to hearing our customer’s comments,” it begins, pleasantly enough. “But your venomous delivery pulls the rug out from under your arguments. -It’s hard to wade through your bile to see if there’s a valid point worth considering.

“You may need a refresher course in lightening up at your local community college.”

Even if you agree with the BlueQ owner’s position, his response only serves to heighten the tension and draw more eyes to a complaint very few people would have ever seen.

And you can’t defend his — presumably accidental — inclusion in the e-mail of an earlier message from an employee where she refers to Cindy as a “crazy bitch.”

We get it — name-calling is nothing new in intra-office customer service e-mails. Just don’t forward that name-calling on to the actual person who complained.

Not surprisingly, the BlueQ response didn’t exactly go over well with Cindy.

“You told me to ‘lighten up’ at a ‘local community college.'” she replies. “Your usage of the phrase ‘local community college’ must mean to insinuate that that is the best I could possibly hope for: acceptance to a community college. Congratulations on your failed attempt to simultaneously insult my intelligence and good institutions of higher education and all they strive to do.”

“I don’t know what fancy and expensive private college you went to,” she continues, “but I wonder if you enrolled in any business classes, because clearly, you haven’t learned a thing.”

Cindy then offers several examples of how BlueQ could have responded to her initial complaint that don’t involve calling her a crazy bitch.

Here are two examples, many of the statements actually taken from the owner’s lengthy response, Cindy gives that she feels would have been more acceptable:

“Ms. Phillips, we are sorry you found our product offensive, and not to your taste. We at BlueQ take great pride in our products and our design. Thank you for your thoughts; we will take this into consideration in the future. Blue Q is a kind company. We’re the area’s largest local employer of individuals with disabilities. We take garbage out of the waste stream and make reusable plastic bags. We donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the environment and world health organizations. We coddle and care for our employees”

Or

“Ms. Phillips, we are sorry you found our product offensive, and not to your taste. We of course feel that math is something that young women should study and be proud to study. Blue Q is a kind company….blah, blah, blah…We coddle and care for our employees.”

To which, according to Cindy, the company’s owner replied:

Ms. Phillips,

MAN your panties are in a bunch!

Get some air up there!

Cindy tells Consumerist that his has been the end of her communications with the company.

We’ve tried reaching out to BlueQ by e-mail but have yet to hear back. If we do, we’ll update this story.

Meanwhile, the company’s Twitter account has been doing a much better job of not calling customers crazy bitches or expressing concerns about the amount of air getting to their crotches.

When one Twitter user expressed his concerns about the math-related sock, BlueQ responded that “Some women hate math. Some men hate it, too. Dumb has nothing to do with it. BlueQ is full of smart women – with a sense of humor.”

Regardless of your position on the topic, that is certainly a more measured response than any given by the company’s owner.

And even after that Twitter user continued to debate that BlueQ’s socks were contributing to the “pervasive, corrosive message in our culture that girls aren’t good at math,” the company ultimately replied with a polite “Point taken and sincerely appreciated. Thanks for fighting the good fight!”

Had the company’s Twitter account been put in charge of responding to Cindy’s initial complaint, we probably wouldn’t be discussing the company right now.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Some Small Cable Companies Are Dropping TV, And Customers Don’t Seem To Mind

(Molly)

Plenty of people have cut back on pay TV — cable and satellite — and gone to internet-only subscriptions in order to save some cash. But the individual cord-cutters aren’t the only ones realizing how expensive programming can be, and how they can live without it in the broadband era. Some small-scale cable companies are also taking the plunge, and cutting out TV service altogether.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a segment of tiny cable companies — some serving as few as a hundred customers — that have made the jump to becoming ISPs only, providing just broadband and phone service to their customers.

The cord-cutter who subscribes to just broadband service, and not pay TV, is a real and growing segment of the population. Although roughly 100 million people still pay up every month for access to prestige dramas and endless Law and Order reruns, over the coming years and decades the trend line is clear: the long-term future is about broadband distribution of content.

Meanwhile, all of that programming really is quite expensive. The details of carriage contracts are highly confidential, but in general a cable company pays networks a few cents to a few dollars for each subscriber that can receive them. So for example, a cable company that includes USA in its basic tier must pay Comcast (owner of NBCUniversal, and therefore of USA) about $0.83 for every subscriber of theirs that gets the basic tier.

For a company that only serves a few hundred or a few thousand consumers, the cost just isn’t worth it. So, the WSJ explains, some tiny providers like Ringgold Telephone in Georgia and BTC Broadband in Oklahoma have eliminated TV service altogether.

Others are strategically cutting back on which channels they decide to offer. Suddenlink, which serves about a million customers, this week stopped including Viacom networks in its lineup.

This is not the first public carriage dispute in recent years to black out Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central among other networks. But consumers increasingly don’t seem to mind going without: earlier this year, a group of small providers serving 900,000 households stopped carrying Viacom channels. They expected to lose as many as 10% of their subscribers but have seen drops of less than 2%, according to the WSJ.

Since 2008, the WSJ reports, about 53,000 cable subscribers have seen their providers either dump TV or go out of business, with the trend accelerating.

Major media companies obviously make much less money from cable operators with a few hundred subscribers than they do from cable operators with several million, like Comcast. But the WSJ estimates that even a 5% drop in subscribers over the next few years could mean up to $2.4 billion in lost revenue for “basic cable networks alone,” which media companies are unlikely to let go without a fight.

Still, although both cable providers and content companies are trying to figure out how to navigate the next few messy years, neither group is worried about the end of TV, so to speak. Both eventually expect that internet-based pay TV services, like the nascent offerings from Sony and Dish, will eventually fill the gap. Provided, of course, that the future of broadband mega-mergers and net neutrality give new options room to grow.

More Cable Companies Take TV Off Menu [Wall Street Journal]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

Competencias docentes en la era de internet

via Educación tecnológica http://ift.tt/1rGee6A www.bscformacion.com

It’s Rock Star Vs. Restaurant In War Of Words Over Rude Service

Was it a case of an entitled rock star who couldn’t handle hearing the word “no,” or was it all about a restaurant doorman who was incredibly rude and may have something against people from the ’90s? Depends on which side you take in the war of words between Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and a Seattle cafe that stopped him and his party at the door.

Morello was recently in Seattle to play a benefit concert for 15 Now, the movement to increase the minimum wage to $15/hour. After the show, he and some others tried to get some late-evening eats at a cafe/bar that was apparently quite busy.

What the two sides agree on is that the doorman said it was crowded and that Morello couldn’t be let in right away. But that’s really about it.

On Twitter, the guitarist raged that the cafe is “the WORST. Super rude & anti-worker. Sh*ttiest doorman in the Northwest.”

But that doorman tells a different story, explaining to The Stranger that the restaurant was “really, really busy” that evening, that there was only “one bartender and one waitress” working and that by that point in the night the two “adamantly did not want to have anybody else in the bar.”

“I’d already gotten rid of everybody that was on the porch. We were already over-served,” says the doorman. “When Morello shows up with his group, maybe a little before 1 a.m., I had to say, ‘I’m sorry. We’re full right now. I’m not letting anybody in.’”

The doorman says the exchange didn’t really get heated and Morello wasn’t being a jerk, but there were questions being asked like “Does the owner like Rage Against the Machine?” (response: “Probably, but we’re full right now.”) and “Isn’t there someplace in the back you can put us, away from everybody?” (response: “No, man, it’s not that kind of place. We’re really small; I don’t have any room for you.”)

But on his Facebook page, Morello gives his own detailed account of the event.

He said he initially had concerns about going to this particular cafe because he’d heard that “while the owner was a good guy and treated staff well, the restaurant itself was on ‘the wrong side of the minimum wage issue'” because the owner has supported a longer implementation period for the higher wages, along with exceptions for businesses with primarily tip-earning employees.

“I am 100% on the side of an undiluted $15Now initiative which is in my view the only ‘pro worker’ position, but hey we were hungry so let’s give it a shot,” writes the Rager.

When his group of six people got to the door, Morello says the doorman told them it would be about a 10 minute wait. But after watching about 10 people leave the cafe, they started asking “Can we come in now? Those people just left,” but the doorman still refused to let them in.

Morello says they offered to order takeout and sit at the now-vacated patio seats. To which, the response was a “no.”

This inspired the best sentence we’ve read in a while (bolded for emphasis).

“Ok what’s really going on here dude? Some of us have traveled a long way. He’s from Kenya! I’m from the 90’s!”

When they saw their friends from 15Now actually inside the cafe, Morello says he told the doorman, “Hey look we don’t even need a table. We’ll just join our friends who are already inside?” Still a no.

“It was like a hipster version of a Studio 54 doorman,” he writes. “At that point my band mate made a flavorful declaration and we decamped to the trusty, attitude free, IHOP where we enjoyed a drama free stack of hotcakes.”

Morello says his group never asked for special treatment or for a private room.

So if anyone was in a Seattle IHOP at around 2 a.m. the other night and thought they spotted a world-famous rock star, you weren’t high. Or maybe you were, but you still might have seen that world-famous rock star.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Some Horrible Person Stole $3,000 From Woman Who Just Wanted To Adopt Some Cats

Not the kittens in question. Just more cute ones. (catastrophegirl)

Cats! We love’em. Well, lots of us do. But despite that urge for a cuddly companion to call your own, it’s good to remember that you should always be careful when buying pets from someone you don’t know. One woman looking to bring two new kittens into her home found that out the hard way when she sent $3,000 to a stranger, and got exactly zero cats in return.

The self-proclaimed cat fancier from Colorado has two cats but wanted to add another two to her home, admitting to 9 News, “I do love cats. These are my babies!”

She searched for kittens on a cat adoption website and found two potential sellers, one of which she decided sounded legit.

He was offering two sphynx kittens (almost hairless, funny ears, sometimes wear coats) and set an initial fee before asking for another thousand dollars to buy health insurance for the cats, as well as fees for things like a crate.

“It sounded like a good deal. It sounded really easy. I said I would go to Utah and he says, ‘Oh no.’ He has a special company that will bring them right to the door. And that’s where it began,” she explained.

So she cooperated and sent him about $3,000 tall told on a re-loadable debit card and later, Western Union. That’s when things got weird — the destination that popped up when she was sending those funds came up as Cameroon, in Africa.

She realized she’d been scammed, admitting that she was perhaps thinking with her heart, and not her brain.

“Well unfortunately a big heart doesn’t pay the bills,” she said, advising others not to send money to anyone who asks for it.

It’s always a good idea to remain vigilant — if someone requests money through Western Union or a reloadable card, don’t do it, especially for things like insurance, processing or paperwork. Ask for a phone number you can call to speak with someone in person at the business, and check out their past dealings with the local Better Business Bureau or the State Attorney General’s Office.

Or heck, head to a rescue shelter and pick up some new friends right away for free.

*Thanks for the tip, Joe!

Woman loses thousands to cat adoption scam [9 News]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Walmart’s Online Grocery Order Pickup Center Is Here

(KFSM)

It looks like a lime green gas station, but the new Walmart store concept in the chain’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas doesn’t fill your gas tank: it fills your car with groceries. Announced earlier this year, Walmart Pick-Up Grocery opened on Monday, combining Walmart prices with the experience of not needing to get out of your car.

Living in Walmart’s hometown, the people of Bentonville are used to new and exciting Walmarts and store concepts. Some of these spread to the rest of the country, like the mini Walmart Express stores; others didn’t really take off. That’s why they’re called test stores.

Here’s how the Pick-Up Grocery works: you have to place your order as early as three weeks and as late as two hours in advance. At the appointed time, you pull up in a drive-thru lane that looks like a gas station, and enter your last name or order number on a touchscreen.

This alerts the warehouse employees, who emerge with your order and load it in the car. “The customer would actually have the opportunity to review fresh products” before having them loaded in the car, the facility’s grocery manager explained to local TV station KFSM.

There are 10,000 items available to order online, including alcoholic beverages and some household items.

Walmart Pick-Up Grocery Concept Opens [KFSM]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Police Chase Down Stolen Doughnut Truck [Insert Obvious Joke Here]

(kristen says)

Police chasing after doughnuts — am I stuck in one of Uncle Larry’s jokes? No, not this time: Someone stole a van full of doughnuts and led police on a merry chase for it through Portland, OR, before cops were able to apprehend the suspect and make him drop a pilfered pastry he was apparently munching on during the pursuit. No doughnut left behind.

According to FOX 12 Oregon, a delivery driver from a local doughnut store had stopped his van at one point to make a delivery, leaving it unlocked with the keys inside. With such tantalizing treats sitting there for the taking, the van was stolen at some point.

Police caught up with the vehicle, turning on the flashing lights to pull it over, but the driver instead sped off with officials chasing after.

Two miles later he gave up the heist and pulled over, which is when he allegedly dropped a doughnut out of his hands, police said.

The man “put his hands out the window and the officer observed a pastry fall from the suspect’s hands,” police said.

He was arrested and charged with unlawful use of a motor vehicle, theft and attempt to elude. It’s unclear if the police were rewarded with all the free doughnuts they could possibly eat, but it is my greatest hope that it is so.

To be fair, I will admit that I would also chase a doughnut truck under certain circumstances, stolen or no. I just really like doughnuts.

Hands up, drop the doughnut: Police chase down stolen Donut Land truck [FOX 12 Oregon]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

FAA: More Than 1,300 Boeing Jets Must Replace Pilot Displays To Prevent WiFi Interference

(sonyaseattle)

While travelers can now use a slew of mobile devices during flight, it’s not just the gadgets in the cabin that fall under the auspices of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency issued an order yesterday saying more than 1,300 Boeing jets must have their pilot displays replaced, to make sure they’re resistant to any possible interference coming from WiFi devices used in the cockpit.

Things like airspeed, altitude and other measurements the pilots need during a flight need to be displayed on those screens, made by Honeywell, reports the Wall Street Journal, and officials say they could get mucked up from such WiFi-enabled devices, especially now that airlines increasingly give pilots things like tablets to assist in cockpit operations.

The displays can be vulnerable to other radio frequency transmissions from things like satellite communications systems and cellphones as well, the FAA says.

U.S. airlines will have five years to complete the swaps on Boeing 777 and 737s, with multiple screens in each cockpit needing an upgrade.

Thus far, no incidents have happened mid-air, but the FAA cited tests from Boeing that showed that “blanking was a safety issue.” For example, if a screen suddenly flickered out during takeoff or landing, there could be “loss of control of the airplane,” the FAA says.

The new units will be better at shielding the displays from signal interference and have upgraded software. Honeywell stressed the fact however, that “no display units have ever blinked in flight due to Wi-Fi interference.”

FAA Orders Replacement of Pilot Displays on Boeing Jets [Wall Street Journal]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist