walmart is your god now
Walmart can try to spin itself as being on the side of good all it wants, but if it ever
suspects you of shoplifting, you may find that you're powerless to fight back. In the case of a couple accused of shoplifting some Bic lighters in Niles, Michigan this past August, Walmart detained them, the police came and cuffed one of them, their two kids were taken to a security room, and—after a review of security footage proved the couple's innocence—they were banned for life from all Walmarts. To top it off, Walmart's legal team has sent the couple a letter asking to be reimbursed for 10 times the value of the lighters, even though the police determined no shoplifting had taken place.
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wtf
Dear kid of abusive mom: yes, this is what it feels like for us when we deal with cell phone retailers, too. At least your mom was arrested. Video below.
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lawsuits
"
Litigant Alert" from WebRecon promises to help
debt collection companies ferret out "overly-litigious debtors" with "a history of suing collection agencies." It's basically a Do Not Call list of troublemakers who had the nerve to fight aggressive collection practices with the law.
Debt collectors are apparently willing to pay $1,595 to figure out who they should leave alone.
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irs
The IRS has ended a controversial program that allowed
private debt collectors to pursue individual debts owed to the government. The private
debt collectors,
described as "bounty hunters who collect
taxes from vulnerable people for profit," were allowed to keep 25% of any collected debts for themselves. Before we celebrate, let's all take a moment to join Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa in thinking about those poor private debt collectors who no longer have jobs harassing and abusing people...
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walmart
Ricky had a bizarre run-in with "Larry" at his local Walmart, where he was shopping recently with his mother, who needed a new trash can. While Ricky browsed the automotive accessories counter, his mom did mom things in the silk flower department, and she left her new trash can next to Ricky's leg while she wandered off. It turns out, you do not leave trash cans anywhere in Larry's line of sight if you know what's good for you.
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delta
On July 20th, Julianna's (delayed) Delta flight landed in Atlanta at 7:30pm, with a connecting flight scheduled for 8:05pm. Julianna, who has
muscular dystrophy, missed the connecting flight because nobody came with a wheelchair until 8:05—the same time the connecting flight took off. To make matters worse, the plane crew told Julianna she might make the flight anyway if she stopped waiting for help and got off the plane
right now, so she crawled down the stairs on her own. When the wheelchair came she was "wheeled into a back room and advised" that her plane had taken off. But that was just the first half of her ordeal, and the next eight hours only got worse.
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detained
This guy was trying to make strawberry jam this morning, and he had to go buy 4 bags of sugar. The cashier threw away the original receipt but put the sugar in a couple of Wal-Mart shopping bags, so Ben left the store thinking everything was, you know, normal for a Saturday morning. Then he was stopped by a security guard, a store manager, and an off-duty police officer, all of whom went batshit crazy on Ben over his 4 bags of sugar and lack of receipt. Before it was over one of the shopping bags was ripped open, a bag of sugar lay broken open on the parking lot, the guard had threatened to kick Ben's ass, and the police officer said, "you'd better not be lying to me." Ben was marched back into the store so they could verify with his cashier that he wasn't a sugar thief. Welcome to Wal-Mart, the police-state superstore where prices are low and civil rights don't exist.
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abuse
Papa John's wouldn't let reader Adi redeem her coupon for a $9.99 extra-large pizza online, so she trekked over to the nearest store in Weymouth, Massachusetts, where she met the franchise owner from hell. The owner insisted that the coupon didn't apply to online orders, so Adi asked to cancel her online order and re-order her pizza in person to get the discount. This prompted the owner to angrily throw the coupon at Adi, before throwing away her ready-made pizza. And was just the start of the fun...
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lawsuits
Talk about crappy service!
JetBlue is the number 1
and the number 2 airline! A man from NYC is suing JetBlue "for more than $2 million because he says a pilot made him give up his seat to a flight attendant and
sit on the toilet for more than three hours on a flight from California," reports CBS News. We're not going to judge the airline too harshly until more of the story comes out, just in case it turns out to be another upset passenger
overstating the situation—but if it's true, it's going to be hard for JetBlue to wipe this story from the public's memory for a while. Especially with all the joke opportunities.
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lawsuits
"We're not the mean waterboarding company that people think we are," says the general counsel for Prosper Inc., a company that sells "coaching packages" over the telephone. They're being sued by a former employee who says he was held down as his boss
emptied a gallon jug of water into his mouth and nose as part of a team-building exercise. Our tipster Rachael writes that it's like "an episode of The Office gone horribly wrong."
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elder abuse
A volunteer in Chicago claims that her client, a 65-year-old woman with dementia, was given a GMAC auto loan for a new 2007 Pontiac, even though she only makes $900 a month and has no driver's license. Now the car has been repossessed and the car lot is saying she owes them nearly $8,000.
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fur
The Humane Society has just released the results from another round of tests on fur-trimmed products from national U.S. retailers, and in four cases they found that the
advertised "raccoon" fur was actually "raccoon dog," a canine indigenous to Asia. This is one case where the FTC is squarely to blame for creating the problem in the first place, because in 1951 they decided that trade trumps scientific classification and declared "that this animal should be referred to as 'Asiatic raccoon' in advertising and labeling."
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recalls
The president of a slaughterhouse at the heart of the largest
meat recall denied under oath on Wednesday, but then changed his mind, that his company introduced sick cows into the food supply, says the NYT.
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sweatshops
With the Gap embarrassed this week by reports that Indian children as young as 10 were
making Gap Kids clothing, a lot of people are asking, just how frequently and to what degree do large U.S. companies like Gap and Wal-Mart monitor their foreign manufacturers? According to Slate,
"anywhere from six months to once every several years." Unfortunately, because the visits are usually announced ahead of time, factories can hide violations, coach employees on what to say, get rid of the child workers, and forge records. In China, there are consultants who will prepare a factory for inspection, going so far as to fake missing records.
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