Always dress for the task at hand. If you’re going on a long hike, wear layers. Going to the beach? Put on some sunscreen. Suspicious clouds in the sky? Pack an umbrella. And if you’re going shoplifting, for gosh sakes, make sure your clothes fit properly. And put on some underpants. [More]
Regal Cinemas Raising Ticket Prices 4% Because You’re All Still Gonna Pay
By May 23, 2013
Thanks to innovations like 3D and IMAX (or IMAX-ish), going to see a movie in theaters is an experience that a home theater really can’t match, even if a home theater has the benefit of comfier seats and no obnoxious strangers. The bosses of Regal Cinemas, one of the chains that have consolidated Americans’ away-from-home movie experience, understand this. So they’re going to raise ticket prices some more. [More]
Theft Of A $37 Walmart Printer Turns Into High-Speed Chase With Meth Flying Everywhere
By May 22, 2013
We live in a world where the desire for a $37 printer can lead to a scene straight out of an action movie, complete with a high-speed police chase and drugs flying out the car windows. Police say a couple was spotted lifting a printer from a Walmart in Louisiana and tried to make a run for it. And it was all downhill (super fast) from there. [More]
Big Lots Finds Kids’ Safety Unbelievably Important
By May 21, 2013
It’s nice that Big Lots takes toy recalls seriously: we agree that alerting people to dangerous products so they can get pulled off shelves as soon as possible is a noble undertaking. It’s also very well and good that they promote their low prices as “Unbelievable!” However, when you combine the two, that’s when things get a little confusing. [More]
Scammers Pretend To Buy Gas Station, Hold Amazing Sale, Run Away
By May 21, 2013
A strange gas station scam in Minnesota didn’t hurt customers, exactly: it benefited customers. The scam victim was the owner of the gas station, who thought that they had sold the place to credible new owners. Instead, after a glorious one-day sale with everything in the convenience store half off and gas about forty cents per gallon below the local market price, the sale collapsed. The owner says that the down payment check bounced, the buyers disappeared, and $50,000 in cash was missing…along with the gas and merchandise that local customers pounced on during that too-good-to-be-true sale. [More]
Before House Fire Flames Are Out, Contractors And Adjusters Drum Up Business
By May 20, 2013
When a house catches fire, there can be more than one type of first responder. There are the life-saving fire department and emergency medical services…and then there are the businesspeople selling repair and cleanup services, who sometimes arrive at the scene at the same time as the official first responders. Instead of hoses, axes, and ladders, these crews carry clipboards, contracts, and business cards. [More]
Consumerist Friday Flickr Finds
By May 17, 2013
Here are twelve of the best photos that readers added to The Consumerist Flickr Pool this week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or just plain neatness. [More]
Man Stuffed $4 Million Lottery Ticket In Cookie Jar, Forgot About It For 3 Months
By May 16, 2013
I have a secret fear that I will win a huge lottery prize, but never know it because I had stuffed the ticket in a coat pocket or a drawer. I deal with this fear by not buying lottery tickets. But this actually happened to a man who lives near Chicago. He says that he had stuffed old lottery tickets in a cookie jar, then took them to the store to see whether they had maybe won a couple of bucks for hitting a few numbers. They had: one ticket won $3. Yay, he could almost buy a gallon of gas! Then another ticket in the pile won more than $4 million. [More]
Oh, Great: China Busted A Counterfeit Durex Condom Mill
By May 16, 2013
Two Chinese entrepreneurs came up with a brilliant business idea: they bought regular old no-name condoms from a factory in one province, and bought packaging material with the globally recognized brand name of Durex, as well as Russian name brand Contex and China’s own brand Jissbon. When all of these big brand condoms started hitting the market at cut-rate prices, the authorities noticed, as the authorities tend to do. [More]
Man Uses $530K Of Insurance Money Meant To Pay For Wife’s Dialysis To Buy Trucks, Skid Loader
By May 16, 2013
When a loved one’s health is hanging in the balance, one might think that a husband would do anything in his power to help his wife. One might think that, but in the case of a man who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing more than $530,000 in health insurance payments, he used that money on things like cars and a skid loader instead of paying for his wife’s kidney dialysis. [More]
Man Arrested For Overnight Grocery Store Feast Of Whipped Cream, Steak, Shrimp, And Beer
By May 15, 2013
According to police, a Kentucky man held the best overnight grocery store campout ever in the wee hours of Monday morning. Employees knew that something was up when they found 57 cans of Reddi-Whip brand whipped cream in the store’s trash. The whipped cream cans use nitrous oxide as a propellant, see. Oh, but the festivities didn’t stop there. [More]
How Not To React To Internet Criticism: The Epic Facebook Meltdown Of Amy’s Baking Company
By May 14, 2013
It appears that the owners of Amy’s Baking Company in Arizona expected an appearance on celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares” program to vindicate them. They believed that they serve quality food, that they have been unfairly slandered by the entire Internet. Maybe they had never seen the reality program, which features last-ditch efforts to save failing restaurants run by people who are delusional or incompetent…and frequently both. [More]
![[I Don't Want Your F***ing App]](http://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tumblr_mm2vg8oomh1spd2y3o1_500.png?w=84)
If I Wanted Your Bleeping App, I Would Have Bleeping Downloaded It
By May 13, 2013
Part of the appeal of having a proper smartphone is that you can point my mobile browser at a website and look at it. You can even look at sites that aren’t designed for mobile phones…well, as long as they aren’t Flash-based. One annoyance of browsing the interweb with a smartphone is that every site and its cousin has its own proprietary mobile app, and they want you to download it. One person finally became annoyed enough with getting nagged to install unwanted apps that they began cataloging screenshots. [More]
Mother’s Day Cards For Dads: A Sweet Gesture Or Holiday Double-Dipping?
By May 13, 2013
“Leave it to Hallmark to double-dip on holidays,” reader Mark noted when he snapped a picture of this card using our Tipster App. “Father’s Day is next month, people.” Well, yes, but there are also legitimate reasons why someone would buy a card like this. [More]
Student Loan Company Implies That If I Don’t Friend Them On Facebook, I Will Default
By May 8, 2013
Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation is a large student loan servicer/guarantor, and a not-for-profit company. Their goal is a worthy one: they want to keep their customers engaged and get them to pay their student loans back. This is for the good of their customers, the good of the company, and really for the good of our entire economy. A recent e-mail they sent to their customers bothered a few readers, though, because it seemed to imply that if they didn’t follow the company on Twitter, they will default on their student loans. [More]
A Bucket Of Chili Proves Useful In Thwarting Would-Be Robbers At Chicken Joint
By May 6, 2013
Silly would-be robbers — if you haven’t learned by now not to try to steal from a restaurant with an abundance of hot stuff around, well, things probably won’t work out for you. Police Down Under say a man attempting a heist at a Sydney chicken shop left with a faceful of hot chili flakes instead of cash, due to a quick-thinking employee. [More]
Man Accused Of Robbing Credit Union To Pay For Disney Cruise Didn’t Want To Ruin Family Trip
By May 3, 2013
Family vacation is a time-honored, lovely, downright stressful and sometimes harrowing tradition. We’ve all seen National Lampoon’s Vacation with the Griswold family (if you haven’t, step into the sunlight, introduce yourself to the world), so we know there’s pressure to make everything go well. But cops say one family man took that to the extreme, by robbing a credit union in order to make the final payment on a Disney cruise. [More]
Humor Website Offers To Buy Giant Stuffed Carnival Banana For $2600
By May 2, 2013
Earlier this week, we shared with you the sad story of a dad who lost his life’s savings playing a carnival game trying to win an Xbox Kinect for his kids (okay, probably for himself too.) He lost $2,600 when going “double or nothing” got terribly out of hand, and has nothing to show for it but a human-sized stuffed banana with dreadlocks. We shared this story as a cautionary tale about gambling, carnival games, and making sound investment choices. Over at CollegeHumor.com, they have a different take. They want the banana. [More]
