(StuffNThings)

There were only 4 of these items left. I grabbed all 4, went to check out. What a surprise! They rang up for the wrong price. The cashier had a funky attitude (another surprise!) and refused to check the shelf price, or to send someone to check the price. She told me that since the items were going to be free, plus an overage (they would OWE me money), that the price didn’t matter, they could not pay me to buy these items.

Well, that’s a lie. According to their coupon policy, if the amount of the coupon exceeds the amount of the item, they CAN give me the difference back, OR apply it to the total value of the items in my cart.

It’s midnight, there is a line of people forming behind me (surprise number 3, there is only 1 register open!), so I told myself fine, I’ll pay full price, use the coupons, and come back to talk to someone with a brain at a later date and have the difference refunded to me.

I tried that, and surprise #4, it failed. I went back a couple of weeks later, armed with my receipt and a print out of their coupon policy. I talked to a manager, the manager had me show her the price on the shelf (it was still there, the price sticker, and they had more of the items in stock). So I pointed them out to her, showed her the shelf price Vs. the price I was charged on my receipt…and she asks if I brought the items with me (just for the record, the items in question were glade air fresheners). I did not. We had used a couple of them, the rest I did not think to bring with me. I told her no, but again pointed out that the items were right there on the shelf, she was even holding one in her hand. She said that I would have to go home and get the items so that they could scan them. Yes, the item that she was holding in her hand. I would have to go home and get mine and bring it back.

So I’m livid, I tell her that’s egregious…and I leave without my refund, again.

I go home and file a BBB complaint. This is in the first half of February. I also sent a letter through their contact form on their web site. I never received a reply from them.

I finally get a reply from them on April 22nd, over 2 months later. They say that there is not much they can do without looking at the coupons (how are the coupons the issue?? And they should have them, as I gave them to the cashier.) They say that they will send me a gift card…but I have to mark the complaint as “resolved” before they send the card. I say fine, mark it as resolved, and never hear from them again.

It’s been 2 months now. They have not sent the gift card, and they ignore any and all communication from me. I have posted on their Facebook page 3 times in the last 2 months, to ask if they can help me with this matter. Their Facebook team says that they will “forward the message”, but nothing ever comes of it, and now the Facebook team wont even respond.

I don’t know what else to do. This is wrong. They overcharged me, lied to me, and are now ignoring me, and they are getting away with it. I need help! Any advice at all on what my next steps should be would be tremendously appreciated.

I wasn’t aware that couponers now had to keep copies of all coupons they use on file.

(Scoboco)

Are you gonna eat that? No? Mind if it just stick in this here bucket, let it sit for a bit and then dump it on my garden? That’s what we call composting (in a nut shell) and it’s been on the mind of New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg lately. His administration tested out a pilot program recently and is now looking at requiring all city dwellers to take part eventually.

City officials said yesterday that after the successful test program in 3,500 Staten Island homes and some Manhattan apartments, the program is expected to expand to 100,000 houses and other dwellings in all five boroughs in the fall, reports the Associated Press.

And while the scrap collecting would be a voluntary effort to make NYC greener at first, Bloomberg’s team wants it to be a mandatory situation in a few years.

That kind of program isn’t unprecedented in the U.S., as both San Francisco and Seattle require compost collection for some residents. It could be a tricky plan to execute, however, so if NYC can pull it off, other cities may follow.

“New York City, because of its density, faces logistical challenges on many fronts, and so when the city concludes that food waste composting is workable and economically and environmentally sound, that’s a decision that other municipalities will give weight to,” said Eric Goldstein, an National Resources Defense Council lawyer who works on waste issues.

It could be tough for some New Yorkers — who wants a bucket of moldy coffee grounds and apple peels sitting around where rats could come a’calling? — but the city says it could save taxpayer dollars.

Currently residents pay around $100 million to deposit 1.2 million tons of food waste a year in landfills, according to the city. If those scraps are turned into compost, it could be used as fertilizer or made into biogas.

This is all part of Bloomberg’s push toward recycling and greening up the Big Apple, as it were, along with his goals of doubling recycling in the city and banning extruded polystyrene containers, known colloquially as Styrofoam.

On a somewhat related note: Please don’t cut down on garbage collection like Portland, Ore. or residents may have to resort to extreme measures to get rid of all those dirty diapers.

NYC aims to require composting food scraps [Associated Press]

(Listener42)

What qualities are important to you? If you have fussy plumbing or use a septic system, the papers that dissolve the best in water after some agitation might be your choice. Strength and tearability? They test those by pushing checking how well a steel ball passes through a pile of sheets. Softness is hard to test with cold machinery, so testers evaluate those by just touching them. With their hands. We think.

Curiously, the top performers are only available at Walmart. Those are Great Value Ultra Strong, Wally World’s house brand, and two products from White Cloud.

Attention Walmart shoppers! White Cloud toilet paper is tops. [Consumer Reports]

And that’s a problem for a website whose primary function is professional networking, and where the user wants his or her profile to be seen by as many employers and headhunters as possible.

If you close off access to your profile, only those who already know you will see your information. Since most of us aren’t hired by our close friends, that’s not good.

This may not be a problem for most people, who have no issue with other LinkedIn users being able to view their profiles and make contact. But for LinkedIn users who are deliberately attempting to avoid stalkers, it’s more than an annoyance.

Buzzfeed has the story of a woman who had left her previous job after being sexually assaulted by her former boss.

Even after she had moved on, he continued to contact her via every available channel. So she blocked him on Facebook, locked him out of her Twitter feed, but he kept reaching out to her on a daily basis through LinkedIn.

Since there is no option for blocking individuals, she could only keep ignoring and deleting his creepy messages. Limiting the visibility of her profile would negate the utility of even having a LinkedIn profile.

When she contacted LinkedIn about her predicament, she says she was told she’d need a court order to block her former boss’s e-mails.

And so she’s started a Change.org petition, asking LinkedIn to rethink its policies.

The letter, addressed to five LinkedIn executives is a simple one-sentence plea: “Offer LinkedIn users a blocking feature against other users.”

It currently has more than 5,300 signatures, and a number of supporters are voicing similar stories.

“I am continually stalked by someone who keeps creating fake accounts to view my location and details,” writes one user. “Like others I have previously hidden all my details but am now currently looking for employment and therefore would like to make certain features of my account public.”

“I can’t use LinkedIn anymore because my ex could find out where I work and that would put my son and I in danger,” writes another.

In response, LinkedIn tells Buzzfeed:

“We do not at this time offer a singular, broad-based block feature, although we would certainly evaluate the need for one if it becomes apparent that there’s a need… LinkedIn offers a large number of granular settings that give our members total control over what’s visible to their connections, their broader network, and others.”

(Lisa Pisa)

Earlier this month Chrysler responded with a big fat “No” to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s request that it formally recall 2.7 million older model Jeeps, over regulator concerns that the vehicles could catch on fire when hit from behind. Today the car company announced that it’s relenting, and will in fact, institute the recall the NHTSA wanted.

Without going into any details of what exactly the company discussed with the NHTSA, Chrysler said today that it had “resolved its difference” with the agencies and will reinforce the rear-mounted fuel tank in certain Jeep SUVS.

In a statement Chrysler says:

“As a result of the agreement, Chrysler Group will conduct a voluntary campaign with respect to the vehicles in question that, in addition to a visual inspection of the vehicle will, if necessary, provide an upgrade to the rear structure of the vehicle to better manage crash forces in low-speed impacts.”

At issue are Jeep Grand Cherokees made between 1993 and 2004 as well as Jeep Liberties from 2002 to 2007.

But despite the fact that the NHTSA says the cars are defective, Chrysler maintains that its vehicles are safe.

“Chrysler Group’s analysis of the data confirms that these vehicles are not defective and are among the safest in the peer group,” the company said in its statement. “Nonetheless, Chrysler Group recognizes that this matter has raised concerns for its customers and wants to take further steps, in coordination with NHTSA, to provide additional measures to supplement the safety of its vehicles.”

It’s probably a good call on Chrysler’s part to agree with the voluntary recall, as its customers might have otherwise lost trust in the company for refusing to cooperate with the NHTSA.

Chrysler reaches agreement with NHTSA, issues recall for 2.7 million Jeep SUVs [Detroit Free Press]

(Steve Rhode)

He writes:

As a SunTrust Mortgage customer for nine years, and a SunTrust Bank HELOC customer for the same amount of time, I decided to finally accept their offer of a “free” Signature Advantage checking account because they valued my banking “relationship.”

A month or so into the new account, the first thing I noticed is that my HELOC monthly payments began to be automatically withdrawn without any knowledge, authorization, approval, or consent on my part. I went into two different branches and explained what was going on – both times I was greeted with employees who had neither the power nor knowledge to understand, much less address, this issue. Like sheep, they looked me in the eyes and denied the bank takes automatic payments – even on their own loans.

Frustrated, but lacking more time, I decided to accept this “feature” and live with it. Automatic payments worked great for a year-and-a-half.

Until this past Spring, when again – without any warning, advise, communication, knowledge, or fanfare – SunTrust stopped helping themselves to my money with automatic monthly payments to their loan. Accordingly, as in the past 18 months, I made no manual payment.

Now, I’ve got two 30-day-late dings on my credit because they did not follow-through with their pattern.

To the end, SunTrust is denying they ever took the money without my authorization, and deny stopping what they fail to acknowledge was happening to begin with.

Writing letters and speaking with CSR’s was akin to speaking to a butter dish.

That’s why it’s a good idea to make sure that automatic payments go through, whether you asked for them or not. That’s a lesson that everyone who depends on auto-payments learns eventually….don’t learn it the hard way.

At that point, it would probably be time to start writing to the butter churn, perhaps firing off e-mails or paper letters to executives. Now, of course, Steven has exactly what he asked for in the first place: the payments that allegedly never existed in the first place no longer exist.

For now.

Priceonomics’ comparison of hotel room rates and Airbnb rates for Philadelphia.

The folks at Priceonomics.com have posted a pretty nifty, if flawed, comparison of median hotel rates vs. Airbnb averages in a number of U.S. markets.

As expected, the most expensive cities for hotels — New York, San Francisco, Boston — are also the three priciest places to rent an apartment from Airbnb. Of this trio, the biggest savings are to be had in San Francisco, where a rented Airbnb apartment will run you $165 for the night, which is around 72% of the median hotel room rate in the city of $229.

The one huge hitch in this study is that this comparison uses rack rates for hotel rooms, and not the prices that are readily available to consumers through booking services like Hotels.com, Travelocity, Priceline and others. For example, a quick search on Hotels.com of San Francisco turned up more than 100 hotels in the city with published nightly rates of at most $200. Even when restricted to 3- and 4-star hotels, there were at least two dozen places with rooms at or below the $165/night rate.

Meanwhile our Airbnb search for full apartments in San Francisco resulted in more than 140 places renting for at least $170/night, with some going for several times that amount.

For a more middle-of-the list city like Philadelphia — 17th most-expensive for hotels ($149) and 13th most-expensive for Airbnb ($125) — the price difference is slightly more distinct, though not as huge, between the two. Even when comparing Hotels.com rates for places to stay in Philadelphia, there were only a handful of 3-or-more star hotels available for under $150, and only a few dozen Airbnb apartments going for a nightly rate of more than $150. Thus, the difference seen in the chart at the top of this page reflects reality more accurately than it would for a city like San Francisco.

So while the Priceonomics comparison is a helpful starting point, remember that these numbers are averages, and that prices will vary wildly within each market. This is especially true for Airbnb, as some spaces offer multiple rooms and/or desirable amenities that can drive the price up, while some people keep their prices low to ensure that the rooms are occupied as often as possible.

Additionally, it’s a bit of comparing apples and oranges, or maybe comparing Granny Smiths and Red Delicious apples, as a hotel room rarely offers more than the bed, a couple of seats and a bathroom, while an Airbnb apartment usually includes a sitting room and a kitchen area. You could compare room-only Airbnb rentals with hotel rooms, but those offerings often include a shared bathroom and other communal spaces, so again it’s not a true one-to-one comparison.

In the end, it all comes down to what you want to pay and what you want to experience. Almost all cities have hotels running the gamut from fleabag to four-star, and you’re likely to find the same range of size, quality and comfort among Airbnb offerings. You should do as much research as possible about either option before plunking down your money, because nothing ruins a vacation faster than having a crappy place to come back to at the end of each evening.

(afagen)

While there are some cities whose denizens will shoot you quite the stinkeye for misidentifying their tubed meats — a Polish sausage is not the same as bratwurst, people — most of us probably know our hot dogs. But despite Americans’ collective familiarity with the city street corner staples, California is taking things a step further with legislation that seeks to come up with a legal definition for “hot dog.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, though we’ve been chomping on hot dogs in their various iterations since at least 1870, now is the time to legally define the tubular victuals.

Hot-dog cart owners could face closures by health inspectors without the definition, prompting the Assembly Health Committee to attempt to come to the rescue.

The proposed change to state health laws lays it out: ” ‘Hot dog’ means a whole, cured, cooked sausage that is skinless or stuffed in a casing that may be known as a frankfurter, frank, furter, wiener, red hot, Vienna, bologna, garlic bologna or knockwurst and that may be served in a bun or roll.”

(I’m not sure my German ancestors would be okay with lumping together so many wursts, but then again, I’m not the one selling hot dogs, am I?)

With a definition in place, health departments can separate how they treat hot-dog vendors compared to food stands that cook raw foods. Hot dogs are already cooked before they hit the stands’ hot water, and as such, require less stringent sanitation standards.

Defining such a ubiquitous food actually serves a purpose for consumers, too, as it’s important to know exactly what you’re eating. 

 ”When Californians buy hot dogs, they want to know what they are getting, sometimes with mustard,” said committee Chairman Richard Pan (D-Sacramento).

Legislators’ ‘hot dog’ definition would aid street vendors [Los Angeles Times]

If you have any of these listed items in your pantry, first check the varieties and flavors against the ones listed on the recall site or press release, then check expiration date or lot numbers. If there’s a match, don’t panic.

If an item is listed as having undeclared walnuts and you’re not allergic to walnuts, for example, you don’t have to do anything at all. You can keep the item, eat it, not eat it, or return it for your own peace of mind.

Items that may be contaminated with bacteria are worrisome for everyone, and you should return them to the retail store where you bought them or contact the company for a refund and further instructions.

Seafood
Blessings, Inc 16-20 EZ Peel Shrimp (Hy-Vee) – labeled as sulfite-free; isn’t
Salmolux Cold Smoked Salmon Products – possible Listeria infection
Gromex Camaron Entero (Dried Whole Shrimp) – undelcared sulfites
Lam Sheng Kee’s Shrimp Balls, Lobster Balls and Fish Package Eggs, and Fresh Fish Cakes – undeclared eggs
Latis seafood products – possible Listeria contamination

Frozen Foods
Costco and Harris Teeter Organic Antioxidant Frozen Berry Mixes – linked to Hepatitis A infections
Lightlife Farmer’s Market Veggie Burgers – undeclared milk
California Pizza Kitchen and DiGiorno Frozen Pizzas – may contain plastic fragments

Desserts and Snacks
See’s Candies Milk and Dark Raisins – undeclared nuts and eggs
Vega One Bars and Vega Sport Protein Bars – undeclared milk
Oskri Coconut Bar Dark Chocolate, Coconut Bar Dark Chocolate Minis, Fig Dark Chocolate Bars, and Almond Dark Chocolate Bars – undeclared milk
Lipari Sunflower Seeds and snack mixes – possible Listeria contamination
Butterfly Bakery Whole Grain Harvest Berry Muffins – undeclared walnuts
Julian’s Recipe European Style Pretzel Baguettes (HEB) – may contain undeclared soy
Single-Serve Reduced-Sugar Cinnamon Toast Crunch Bowlpak (food service only) – possible salmonella contamination
Uncle Eddies Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Cookies – undeclared walnuts
Cheryl’s Buttercream Frosted Cinnamon Pumpkin Cookies – undeclared peanuts
Next by Nature Dark Chocolate Bananas – undeclared milk and walnuts

Prepared Foods
Creole & Company Creole Bisque – undeclared milk

Mixes
Eco-Cuisine boxed mixes – possible samonella contamination

Sauces and Spices
Krinos Tahini products – possible salmonella contamination

Pets
Natural, EVO, Healthwise, Mother Nature and Karma brand pet foods – possible Salmonella contamination (this is a new recall, not the one from a few months ago)
Wardley Betta Fish Food – possible Salmonella contamination
Rural King Deer Corn – possible aflatoxin contamination

Drugs and Supplements
Bethel 30 weight loss pills – actually contains banned drugs

(Maulleigh)

Cogent Communications is one of the nation’s largest bandwidth providers, and given that around 1/3 of all downstream Internet traffic in the U.S. is Netflix-related, it’s not a surprise that one of Cogent’s big clients is Netflix. Cogent has had a peering arrangement with Verizon, wherein the two providers allow the free exchange of traffic across their respective lines, but the company claims that Verizon isn’t being as peer-like as it used to be.

See, when a peering port hits around 50% capacity, it’s expected that another port will be opened up to keep things from getting congested. It’s like opening up a new checkout line at the supermarket when there’s a sudden rush. Cogent’s CEO says that Verizon is now letting these ports fill up without opening new ones.

“They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,” he claims. “Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.”

Cogent says that Verizon’s explanation for the lack of cooperation is that Cogent is now providing bandwidth for large streaming video service. And we’re guessing Verizon isn’t talking about the new RedBox streaming, as Verizon owns a good chunk of that service. Come to think of it, that financial investment in a competing streaming service could be an incentive to make Netflix look bad to the end-user.

GigaOm asked Verizon about the Cogent/Netflix logjam and received the following non-response:

“Verizon operates one of America’s lowest-latency, highest capacity networks. The various classes of Internet speeds we offer are among the fastest in the nation. Time and again, customers rate us best in class in various reports and surveys. Our customers enjoy a consistently superior Internet experience because our networks can adapt and grow with their use.”

Having problems with your Netflix? You can blame Verizon [GigaOm]