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Coffee lovers, rejoice! Dunkin' Donuts is giving away free 16 oz. cups of iced coffee today—unless you look under 18 and don't have identification. Tipster Carolyn watched with disbelief as workers at the Dunkin' Donuts at 1433 2nd Avenue on New York's Upper East Side refused to serve two high school seniors who didn't have identification.
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we are curmudgeons
subscriptions
Two years ago I purchased items for my grandchildren at KidsStuff.com. This month (March 2008) I found an $18.00 charge from them on my American Express card. I phoned the accounting department and asked what the charge was for. I was told that it was an "automatic" charge for "joining" the KidsStuff "club." Of course, I never placed an order to join any such club. The accounting department offered to reverse the charge to be effective in five days. I demanded a reversal show up by tomorrow and promised to advertise their automatic charges everywhere I could. Believe me, I am a big internet purchaser and this sort of rip-off shouldn't happen, especially after not having been on the site for over two years. The obvious lesson is to be sure you always go over every single charge on those credit cards. Those small $18 charges can add up to big money for unscrupulous companies.
Look at what they did to Kool-Aid man. He started out as a giant jug of sugar water, busting through walls and letting you drink out of him, a seemingly never-ending supply of flavorful fun. Flash forward to today and his liquid stomach is stapled. How the hell are we supposed to have an all-afternoon sugar high off that teacup? And look what they did to his clothes. Instead of fruity nudity, fig leaves. And look how they foreshortened him to emphasize the fruit and berries in his hands. So now he's tiny and modest and healthy. Yay, how awesome. How far we have fallen from Eden. After the jump, a cartoon rendering of Dane Cook's Kool-Aid standup bit, which captures the essence of the original Kool-Aid man commercials in its own special way.
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Lisa made her kids impervious to advertising by asking pointed questions that forced them to think about the source and truthfulness of ads. She knew action was needed when when her kids, who weren't old enough to read, stopped in front of the bleach while shopping to ask the advertiser's dream question: "Mom, aren't we going to buy some Clorox?" Hit the jump to see how she responded.
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tender
"At first it started out as a joke, then everyone else started saying we're protesting against like how short our lunch is," student Alyssa Concannon said.More »
The bus-eating abominable snowmen that commandeered I-95 early yesterday morning flummoxed our plans to return to New York on the Chinatown bus. As we wandered through Union Station assuring our mother that we would take Amtrak, we came across this magnificent sign in the music store FYE telling kids under 18—presumably a key demographic—to keep away until 4 p.m. As our friend took a picture, a surly FYE employee sternly warned that we were breaking the law.
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ouch
security
2:51 AM on Wed Jan 30 2008
By Chris Walters
2,201 views,
21 comments
privacy
badvertising
unfriendly skies
someone think of the children
Southwest escorts children 5 through 11 who are traveling alone, but "once you hit 12, you're considered a youth and not an unaccompanied minor," said Teresa Laraba, the airline's vice president for ground operations.Unlike most airlines, Southwest is nice enough not to charge for escorting younger kids, but you're out of luck once your precious little brat turns 12. So what should you do? More »
The CEO of Toys "R" Us tells the AP that all this testing of toys by advocacy groups is frustrating: "We've had many, many cases where we have taken the products and retested them and found them to be totally safe." Stupid advocacy groups! The toy store will protect us! [Associated Press]
toys
health
junk food
The nutrition standards would allow only plain bottled water and eight-ounce servings of fruit juice or plain or flavored low-fat milk with up to 170 calories to be sold in elementary and middle schools. High school students could also buy diet soda or, in places like school gyms, sports drinks. Other drinks with as many as 66 calories per eight ounces could be sold in high schools, but that threshold would drop to 25 calories per eight-ounce serving in five years.More »
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