93-Year-Old Woman Celebrates 75th Anniversary Working For The Same Company

(Associated Press video)

She might be eight years younger than the 101-year-old man who’s worked for the same lighting company for 73 years, but at 93, an Alabama woman outstrips his number by two years, as today she celebrates 75 years working at a Birmingham jewelry store.

Frances started working at the family-owned Bromberg & Co. (one of the nation’s oldest family-owned retailers, the Associated Press notes) on Nov. 21, 1939, when she was hired to polish silver. She’s stayed ever since.

“Frances is a remarkable person,” said Bromberg’s President Rick Bromberg, saying she’s still a valued employee who contributes to the bottom line. “She is the longest-serving employee in the history of our company, including family.”

When she started working there she made $8 a week, and was later transferred to gift wrap. Cut to 1970, and Frances was in charge of the company’s multimillion-dollar jewelry inventory.

“Anything I wanted to do in the store I started going it,” she said. “I’d go move from one department to the other because I just like going around in the store and looking at the pretty things.”

The company held a celebratory breakfast for her this morning on her workiversary.

She says she’d like to keep working as long as she can.

“Last year I thought I was going to have to give up because of the fact I broke my hip several years ago, had knee surgery and all those things,” she said. “But I snapped back every time.”

93-year-old woman marks 75 years with same company [Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

The Most Expensive Blue Diamond You’ll Ever See, But Never Touch Sold For $32.6M

This 9.75-carat blue diamond set two world records when it was auctions for $32.5 million dollars at Sotheby’s Thursday. (Sotheby’s)

In the past, Consumerist has reported on some high-priced, heavily sought-after auction items –– there was the most valuable stamp that sold for $9.5 million and the world’s most expensive bottle of whiskey priced at $628,205. But combining those two winning bid wouldn’t even get you close to half of the $32.6 million someone bid to win a blue diamond at Sotheby’s Thursday night.

Forbes reports that the $32.645 million winning bid for the 9.75-carat fancy vivid blue diamond set two records: the highest bid for a blue diamond and the highest price-per-carat for any diamond ($3,348,205 per-carat).

The diamond, which was from the collection of heiress and philanthropist Rachel Lambert Mellon, also shattered its high estimated bid price of $15 million.

“From the moment I saw this diamond, I knew that it would be one of the most important stones that I will ever have the privilege of presenting at auction,” Gary Schuler, head of Sotheby’s Jewelry Department in New York, tells Forbes. “Mrs Mellon’s diamond absolutely deserves the place in the record books that it achieved tonight.”

In all, seven bidders spent 20 minutes trying to win the pear-shaped diamond. The gem ultimately sold to a Hong Kong private collector, who named it “The Zoe Diamond,” Forbes reports.

The previous high-bid blue diamond record holder sold for $24.3 million at Christie’s in London in 2008. The earlier per-carat auction record of $2.4 million per-carat was set by a 14.82-carat fancy vivid orange diamond at Christie’s in Geneva in 2013.

My colleague Chris says I can’t run a story about blue diamonds without including this:

Bunny Mellon’s Blue Diamond Sells For More Than $32.6 Million, Sets Two World Auction Records [Forbes]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Expect To See More Ads Pretending To Be Editorial Content

This lovely story — which grossly overestimates my affection for kale — is currently sitting at the top of the Buzzfeed homepage. Expect to me 34% more of this kind of crap in the coming year… You were warned.

At the same time as Google is looking to give some sites a way to make money by not running ads, advertisers are ramping up their spending on ads that look like editorial content and can’t be avoided with any ad-blocking plugin.

We’ve written before about the prevalence of so-called “native” advertising — sponsored articles dressed up to look like it is part of the editorial content of the site you’re reading — and the many ways in which sites disclose (or obscure) that the story is bought and paid for.

But in spite of the fact that consumers don’t need another listicle (paid for by Naked Juice) about the benefits of chia seeds, or posed photos of a food website’s editor showing off the latest Gap clothing, or advice from Converse on how to be more creative, AdAge reports that many of the country’s biggest advertisers, including GE and Ford, plan to increase the amount of money they spend on this nonsense.

In all, advertisers are expected to spend $4.3 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) in 2015 on native advertising, a 34% increase over the amount wasted this year on stories written by Boeing about submarines and Toyota-sponsored lists about people who “Elevated Their Transportation Game,” which are four words that vaguely sound like they might mean something when strung together.

To make it easier to shoehorn in this alien content, advertisers are even paying for some sites’ editorial staffs to create these story-length ads.

But these advertisers might be tossing billions of dollars into the abyss as native advertising poses a huge risk with the chance of little reward.

Unlike traditional advertising, which tries to get as many eyeballs on an ad as possible, native advertising is usually very targeted to a specific audience. GE can run the same dishwasher ad on countless sites, but it can only choose one or two places to post its advertorial quiz. If that fails, the campaign is sunk.

Which is why so many of these native ads use clickbait headlines and appear on sites that every friend of yours from high school can’t stop linking to on Facebook. Not only does this increase the odds of the ad being shared, but as we recently pointed out, it also further obscures the fact that the content is sponsored.

Native advertising also gets around plugins that block online ads from being served up on web pages, so while all those banners, GIFs, and videos in a site’s sidebars might be stopped by your plugin, you’ll still be faced with some story about Depends from Kimberly-Clark.

That said, some folks, including my colleague Laura, say that the Ad Detector plugin for Firefox and Chrome does do a decent job of flagging these sponsored stories so that you don’t waste your time clicking on them.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

McDonald’s Worker Accused Of Sticking Glass In Cop’s Big Mac In 2005 Wins $437K

(SarahSphar)

It’s the end of a long story that started back in 2005, when a New York City police officer said he bit into shards of glass in his Big Mac after picking up food from the drive-thru a McDonald’s in the Bronx. An 18-year-old cashier confessed to the alleged crime, and the officer sued the franchise for $6 million. But the worker recanted his confession and was later acquitted of charges related to the incident, and the officer settled for $15,000 back in 2009. It was that settlement that paved the way for the cashier to fight back against the city, arguing that the officer made the whole thing up to sue the city for money. He’s won a settlement with NYC himself, nabbing $437,000 for his efforts this week.

The worker was acquitted in 2010, after his defense team argued that he had been under pressure from four detectives at the time, which is why he felt pressured to confess. And after the police officer settled with the city, it allowed his lawyer to get his hands on the depositions from that time and uncover crucial inconsistencies in the story, reports the Associated Press.

Previously, the worker had tried to argue that it was a fabrication, but the case was dismissed in 2012, a decision that a lower state appeals court upheld. But then, the New York State Supreme Court decided to hear the case earlier this month, leading the city to offer him the settlement this week.

“I was thrilled when I found out,” the now a 28-year-old said.”I really thought this wasn’t going to happen.”

His attorney said the depositions showed inconsistencies within the officer’s story of that night, where the cop claimed he’d driven away and bitten into the glassy burger. After that he’d stopped to take care of his canine partner, before calling his superior and heading to the hospital.

Despite what he’d told other officers, medical records from that ER visit show that there were no apparent symptoms of swallowing glass, the worker’s attorney argued, and that the officer’s claim that he’d talked to his family doctor later about finding glass in his stool weren’t true — the doctor testified that the conversation never happened.

Restaurant workers also testified that the worker had been a half hour late the night of the incident, and wasn’t even on duty when the officer bought his Big mac. Somehow that information never made it into the police report, the lawyer says.

Now, almost 10 years later, the workers says he’s happy to finally have some closure.

“It’s not fair what they did,” he said. “It makes a lot of good officers look bad.”

For more background on the story, check out this 2010 piece from the New York Times.

McDonald’s worker charged in glass-in-Big Mac case wins $437K [The Associated Press]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Dish Customers Get Cartoon Network, CNN Back After Month-Long Blackout

Just hours after averting (for now) a blackout of CBS-owned stations in 14 markets, Dish Network has made nice with another of its foes in the broadcasting world, ending the month-long blackout of Turner channels like CNN, HLN, and the Cartoon Network.

It’s a temporary peace at best, as the end of the blackout doesn’t mean that the two parties have reached a deal. Instead, Dish and Turner have agreed to temporarily extend their previous agreement while they continue to hash out new terms.

This means that CNN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, truTV, TCM, HLN, CNN en Espanol and Boomerang are coming back to Dish subscribers’ screens, and that rumored potential blackouts of Turner-owned TBS and TNT are off the table.

During the blackout, Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen didn’t help ease tensions between the two sides when he publicly questioned the importance of CNN to a pay-TV company’s lineup.

“Twenty years ago, CNN was a must-have channel, but it’s not a top 10 network anymore,” said Ergen at the time.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Why Big Companies Spend So Much Money On Washington: It Works Even Better Than You Think

(darrenleno)

That money talks in Washington is conventional wisdom for a reason. Corporations, industries, and a handful of extraordinarily wealthy individuals spend big bucks on campaigns and on lobbying not for fun, but because they expect to get something back in return. And while adding up all those expenditures is comparatively straightforward, finding out who gets how much back has been harder… until now. A new study finds that billions of dollars might go into D.C., but trillions are coming back out.

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit, released a study this month they call Fixed Fortunes. In their research, the Foundation looked at six years of campaign and lobbying spending by the nation’s 200 largest corporate spenders (“the Fixed Fortune 200″), and compared it to the favorable returns those companies get.

The numbers are as depressing as they are large. In total, the 200 organizations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. Corporations (or the people who run them) might be avaricious, but they’re not stupid: nobody spends that much without getting a solid return from their investment. And so they do: together, over the same six-year span, those corporations received $4.4 trillion in federal business and support.

In a rough sense, for every dollar they spend on Washington, the biggest companies in the U.S. are getting more than $750 back. With outcomes that good, it’s no wonder spending on politics keeps going up.

The returns from the feds take all kinds of forms. Sometimes lobbying results in policies and industries more favorable to a company’s long-term interests, but sometimes it also means actual cash in hand in the form of loans, grants, or lucrative contracts:

For example, the federal government issued contracts to purchase goods and services that totaled a little more that $3 trillion during the period; companies among the top 200 corporate political givers won $1 trillion of that, a third of the total. The Treasury Department managed $410 billion in loans and other assistance issued under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, created by Congress to cope with the 2008 financial crisis; of that amount, $298 million, about 73 percent, went to 16 firms among the Fixed Fortune 200. When the Federal Reserve took extraordinary measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it funneled nearly $2.8 trillion through 29 Fixed Fortune firms. The companies that participated the most in politics got huge returns.

The companies come from all sectors, the Foundation reports. Finance takes about a quarter of the slots, with 48 businesses far and away making the largest number of campaign donations time and time again. Of the other three-quarters, 28 fall into communications and electronics, 21 in healthcare, 13 in defense and aerospace, 13 in agribusiness, 11 in “energy and natural resources” (mining, oil, etc), and 7 in transportation.

The “Fixed Fortune 200″ gave to roughly a quarter of all Congressional incumbents (approx. 144 members) in each election cycle, the Foundation found. The same group also accounted for roughly 1% of all lobbying clients (there are over 20,000), but for more than a quarter, 26%, of all lobbying spending.

The Foundation looked at a six-year span — 2007 through 2012 — specifically because they wanted to include spending both before and after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. In that case, and again in 2014′s similar McCutcheon ruling, the Court held that when it comes to politics, money is protected speech and therefore spending can’t be limited. The ability to buy your way into a favorable political outcome, therefore, is protected.

The Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, also found that influence is only tantamount to corruption if it reaches cartoon-villain levels of obviousness. Since nobody is handing over giant burlap sacks with dollar signs printed on the side in exchange for mysterious briefcases, it’s all above-board and legal.

Spending, meanwhile, continues to increase. Candidates, their campaigns, the parties, and donors spent about $1.5 billion (with a B) on the 2014 midterms. That’s on top of the $3.24 billion spent on formal lobbying last year, and the $2.4 billion and counting spent this year.

In the six-year span covered by the Sunlight Foundation study, General Electric was the biggest overall spender, to the tune of over $151 million. GE, in turn, received $23.5 billion in federal business and $19.6 billion in federal support during that same time period.

However, GE was nowhere near the biggest recipient of federal business, which the Foundation defines as including government contracts and some other transactions. That honor goes to massive defense contractor Lockheed Martin, unsurprisingly, with $204.2 billion of business from the feds. Fellow defense and aerospace contractors Boeing ($187.9 billion) and Northrop Grumman ($88.6 billion) were right behind.

The biggest recipients of government support (“including loans, loan guarantees, grants, and money advanced to companies in the aftermath of the financial crisis”) were, again unsurprisingly, all banks. Citigroup received $503.4 billion of support, followed by JPMorgan Chase with $485.6 billion and Bank of America at $457.1 billion.

You can browse the full table, or download the data set to do your own analyses, by clicking here.

Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions [Sunlight Foundation]

by Kate Cox via Consumerist

You Can Now Share Tweets Using Twitter’s Direct Messages

(SarahMcGowen)

Though it might seem like a feature that should’ve been in place already, the ability for Twitter users to share tweets of interest via the platform’s direct messages option is something the company just rolled out this week.

Now when you see a specific tweet that you want to share privately, there are options other than simply retweeting it or quoting it within Twitter, Twitter says in a new blog post. Sharing tweets within Twitter? What a novel idea!

On the Twitter site, Tweet Deck and iOS and Android Twitter apps, users can click on a tweet in their timeline and select “Share via Direct Message,” which will beam the link straight to the friend of their choosing.

Before this change, users would have had to copy the URL of the specific tweet and paste it into a direct message, an extra step that again, one might think Twitter would’ve remedied before now, seeing as sharing within Twitter is just logical.

Why have a messaging function if not to share the content from that same platform easily? Oh right, for famous people to accidentally not understand what they’re doing and send private messages on their public timelines instead.

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

Amazon Reportedly Launching Hotel Booking Site In 2015

(Natasha L.)

Consumers preparing to go on vacation might peruse Amazon for the necessities: sunscreen, rafts, hiking backpacks –– you name it and the online retailer probably has it. Unless, of course, you were looking to book your lodging. But that’s about to change now that the e-tailer is reportedly gearing up to launch its own hotel-booking service that would compete with the likes of TripAdvisor and Booking.com..

Skift reports that Amazon is poised to launch Amazon Travel, a site dedicated to booking at independent hotels and resorts near major cities, around January 1.

The site’s initial rollout will reportedly feature a selection of hotels within a few hours of New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

Citing representatives of three independent hotels, Skift reports that Amazon’s aim with the new service is to create a marketplace for independent and boutique hotels that might not have the marketing power afforded to larger chains or online travel agencies.

Amazon did not respond to Skift’s request for comment on the new venture.

Of the hotels that Skift spoke with, two had already signed on with Amazon, while the third was giving the proposition “heavy consideration.”

According to the hoteliers, properties would load their room types, availability, pricing information, and photos into an Amazon extranet and would pay a standard 15% commission to Amazon for the prepaid bookings.

When a consumers decides to book with the hotel, Amazon sends the property an email notification and the hotels update their calendar on the extranet.

The properties would receive their payments from Amazon for the booked stays in two installments and could attempt to negotiate a lower commission rate, Skift reports.

One hotelier tells Skift that Amazon used TripAdvisor ratings as part of their criteria for selecting properties to participate in the new service. He says the e-tailer would only use a few properties per destination and those hotels would have to be rated four stars or above.

So far, it appears that Amazon Travel would only be focusing on hotels, but could eventually add flights and other travel accommodations.

A hotelier that already signed on to the service, says they were persuaded to do so by Amazon’s enormous customer base.

While Amazon Travel might offer similar hotel options to other travel sites like Booking.com, Skift reports that Amazon’s model is significantly different.

Although both sites would use an agency/commission model, Amazon appears to be starting with prepaid bookings. Booking.com generally offers a pay-at-the-hotel model for consumers.

For that reason and the fact that one hotelier said they would have to wait for two payments from Amazon, Skift envisions it could be difficult to persuade hoteliers to join the new service.

However, by targeting a large niche market – independent and boutique hotels – Amazon is setting itself apart from the competition which largely focuses on large chain properties.

Robert Cole, a hotel consultant with RockCheeta, tells Skift that Amazon’s presence in the hotel market will likely shake things up.

“A key will be if Amazon can create a great user experience and drive traffic,” he says. “Travel is a big global market without shipping/logistics costs. Thinking special Amazon Prime deals are a no-brainer when running at scale”

Skift reports this isn’t Amazon’s first time entering the travel market. In 2001 and 2006 the company partnered with Expedia and SideStep, respectively. In the partnership with SideStep, the company created an Amazon travel store offering flight, hotel, car and vacation package searches.

Exclusive: Amazon to Get Into Hotel Booking With Launch of Travel Site [Skift]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

Southwest Airlines Sued Over “Early Bird” Fees That Don’t Guarantee Priority Boarding

(Adam Fagen)

When you pay a $25 fee to board a flight — especially one without assigned seats — ahead of other passengers, you might be ticked off to arrive at the gate and find out that not only aren’t you in the highest-priority boarding group, but that some of the people in front of you didn’t pay any additional money for their place in line. This is why a pair of Southwest passengers have filed a class-action suit against the airline, claiming the airline’s Early Bird Check-In program is “deceptive, fraudulent, and misleading.”

In the complaint [PDF] filed last week in a federal court in California, the plaintiffs say they each bought “Wanna Get Away” tier (aka coach) tickets on Southwest and paid $12.50 per flight leg ($25 round-trip) for Early Bird access, which is supposed to automatically check you in and assign you a boarding position 12 hours before those passengers who didn’t pay the fee.

But when they got to the airports for their respective flights, both plaintiffs — one of whom had to board with the B group of travelers — say that the travelers in front of them had not all paid for the early access and who were not Business Select passengers.

Some of the people in front of the plaintiffs had paid the higher “Anytime” fares, but as you can see from the chart below, priority boarding is not one of the perks associated with this middle tier of ticket:

The plaintiffs say that Southwest’s policies are confusing and contradictory, as the above chart mentions no boarding benefit for Anytime tickets, but the below answer in the Early Bird FAQ shows that Anytime passengers who pay for Early Bird access will be given a higher priority than Wanna Get Away passengers:

“This is ambiguous and misleading,” reads the complaint, which alleges that passengers would not buy the Early Bird access — and Southwest wouldn’t make millions in ancillary revenue from it — if they were “properly informed.”

Additionally, the lawsuit points out that Southwest puts no cap on the number of Early Bird Check-ins it can sell for each flight, meaning that an entire plane of around 200 passengers could — in theory — all pay for priority boarding.

“[A] customer may purchase the ‘Early Bird Check-in’ add-on and still receive a boarding position of C sixty (C60), the last boarding position of the flight,” argue the plaintiffs, “thus creating a fiction of ‘priority boarding.’”

The class action seeks damages for all Southwest travelers who paid for tickest and/or Early Bird access on Southwest in the last four years.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist

Zappos Is Opening An Enormous Real-Life Holiday Pop-Up Store

(OrderWithMe)

Zappos is famous for its attentive customer service, but how would that translate to real life? Customers will have the opportunity to find out from this weekend until December 31, as Zappos opens a 20,000 square foot holiday pop-up store in downtown Las Vegas. Since it’s Vegas, the store will be open 24/7 the whole time (except for Thanksgiving and Christmas) and offer an integrated retail and online shopping experience, especially to customers who download the app before they shop.

The app? The retail venture isn’t all Zappos: their partner is ShopWithMe, a company seeking to provide integrated online and in-store inventory services for small retailers. The idea for the pop-up store (and for retailers that sign on with the service later on) is that customers can fondle and try on merchandise, then use handy kiosks or their smartphones to order items that aren’t in stock.

While most people refer to this as a Zappos project because they’ve actually heard of Zappos, ShopWithMe is behind the endeavor. Selling Zappos products during the holiday season seems sort of incidental to the whole project. Their goal is to show off their services, using Zappos’ vast inventory of online items to show off their own services.

ShopWithMe is a venture of OrderWithMe, a company that in turn is also based in Las Vegas. One of its investors is Zappos founder Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Fund.

Preview the Zappos Pop-Up Shop in Downtown Las Vegas [Tech.co]

Zappos opens first freestanding store [Chain Store Age]

JOIN THE PARTY [ShopWithMe]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist