Do you have an old prepaid debit card or major credit card-branded gift card sitting around? Maybe it’s sitting around because it has a balance on it that’s too small to be very useful, yet not such a small amount that you’re willing to throw it away. Here’s a novel solution: use it to split a transaction on Amazon. [More]
Retail Services
Watch A GameStop Employee Go Apes&*t About Annoying Customers
By 12.5.13
The Internet has given new life to a nearly 4-year-old video of a GameStop employee’s screaming, box-tossing, not exactly ethnically sensitive rant, in which he loudly vents about those pesky customers that make his job such a pain in the rear-end. [More]
Boarded-Up But Open Sears Cited For Urban Blight
By 12.5.13
Rioters destroyed storefronts in downtown Oakland, California five months ago, filling the area with sadness and boarded-up windows. All of the businesses have fixed up their public faces except one. One retailer’s huge building still has boarded-up windows and looks abandoned. Local residents call the blighted storefront “depressing,” and the city issued a citation for “blight.” The blighted business? Sears. [More]
Toll-Free Number On Walmart Black Friday TV Voucher Forwarded To Wisconsin Spa
By 12.4.13
There might have been thousands of people who received vouchers from Walmart during Thanksgiving weekend that entitled them to order a television online at a certain price. For many of them, the voucher didn’t work, so they called the toll-free number on the voucher. For some reason that isn’t clear to anyone yet, this number was forwarded to a spa in Wisconsin. [More]
Non-Profit Sends Cake To Amazon To Remind It Of 3-Year Overdue Invoice
December 4, 2013
MusicBrainz is a free-to-use encyclopedia of music-related metadata (all that information, like artist name, track name, composer, etc.), and like a lot of free-to-use services, it has a commercial tier for companies whose use would put an undue burden on the service. Yesterday, the folks at MusicBrainz sent over a cake to Amazon to remind the online giant that it hasn’t paid a 3-year-old invoice for its commercial use of the service. Let’s hope the accounts payable people got the message before someone just left it in the break room for everyone to gorge on. [via Boing Boing] [More]
Number Of U.S. Banks Hits Record Low
By 12.3.13
Back in 1985, there were around 18,000 different federally insured banks operating in the U.S. But in the nearly three decades since, numerous failures and mass consolidation has left us with around 38% of that 1985 number, meaning Americans now have the fewest banking options since the federal government began tracking these stats back in 1934. [More]
Black Friday Eve Not The Optimal Time For An Emergency Trip To Walmart
By 12.3.13
Stuff always breaks at the worst possible time, doesn’t it? That was Josh’s experience over Thanksgiving weekend. The household he visited over the holiday weekend had a plumbing emergency on Thursday. With no plumbers available for obvious reasons, they dug up the lawn and attempted a DIY repair. It went well until they made a trip to the only hardware store in town that was open: Walmart. [More]
Is Sephora Really Banning Customers Who Spend Thousands Every Year?
By 12.3.13
It was news to us that beauty superstore Sephora recently debuted a new tier to its customer loyalty program. VIB Rouge is for customers who spend at least $1,000 per year at Sephora stores, because some people manage to do that. Some customers report that they were banned from online purchases for placing too many orders. This seems like a bad idea. [More]
The Robot Wars Begin: UPS Also Looking Into Drone Deliveries
By 12.3.13
Everyone’s talking about how Amazon has secretly been developing an army of delivery drones that will, in my not-at-all paranoid opinion, turn on their creators and begin using human beings as living batteries. But a new report claims that UPS is also working on some creepy copters of its own. [More]
Fuzzy Math At Work: Dog Food, Towels, Bagels, Muffins
By 12.3.13
Fuzzy math: it’s not cuddly numbers, but what happens when you add up bulk pricing at a major retailer and things just don’t add up. Buying things in bulk is supposed to make things cheaper. Putting things on sale is supposed to make them cheaper, too. In the real world, that isn’t always the case. [More]
Find Some AA Batteries That Are Not Terrible
By 12.2.13
Haven’t you always wanted to buy a bunch of different brands of batteries, test them side by side in the same appliance, and see which one lasts the longest? No? Well, let’s pretend that you have. Everyone uses batteries at some point, and our fully-charged colleagues over at Consumer Reports tested some for all of our benefit. [More]
This Is Probably The Worst Cyber Monday Deal Of 2013
By 12.2.13
Retailers with a huge coupon list the exclusions to that coupon when manufacturer deals or other factors keep them from lowering the price too far on a given item. We understand that. What we understand slightly less is why Dick’s Sporting Goods bothers to publish their exclusions at all. [More]
5 Non-Drone Suggestions For Amazon PrimeAir
By 12.2.13
Last night, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos unveiled his not-at-all-fraught-with-problems plan to unleash an autonomous fleet of delivery drones into the air, which he says it at least another two years off because of those wet blankets at the FAA and their silly “rules.” So we thought of a few suggestions that might be doable in the interim. [More]
Toy Self-Checkout Prepares Children For Bleak Future Of Consumption Without Human Interaction
By 12.2.13
What kind of future are we preparing our children for? There’s no way to know, but reader Beth noticed a toy intended to prepare kids for a cold, robotic future: the My Very Own Shop N’ Pay Market, available at Walmart for $20. Yes, it’s a toy self-checkout. [More]
Costco’s Clever Plan To Sell Both Gas & Liquor In D.C. Results In Death Threats
By 12.2.13
In Washington, D.C., you can’t sell alcoholic beverages and gasoline at the same business. But when Costco came to town, it didn’t throw up its hands and do away with one or the other parts of its business. Instead, it got clever and figured out a way to sell both booze and discount gas, a move that hasn’t gone over well with other gas stations in the city. [More]
Walmart Sold 2.8 Million Towels This Weekend
By 12.2.13
Sure, we in the media like to focus on the people who punch each other over televisions at Walmart stores during the weekend after Thanksgiving. While the mega-retailer sold millions of TV sets this weekend, that wasn’t their top seller. What item did they move the most of over the long weekend? Towels. [More]
The Robots Are Winning: Amazon Wants To Use Autonomous Drones To Deliver Stuff To Your Door
By 12.1.13
What’s the next step in door-to-door delivery for online purchases? According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, it’s self-piloting drone helicopters, which isn’t at all terrifying. [More]
Here Are Some Videos Of People Who Spent Thanksgiving Fighting Over Discounted Junk
By 11.29.13
Can we pour one out for the memory of Thanksgiving, the once-loved holiday that took a shot to the gut yesterday when hordes of bargain-hunters chose to forego time with family and loved ones in favor of overhyped discounts on clearance items, and then died forever when the first punch was thrown, presumably minutes after the doors opened. For those of us who didn’t go shopping last night, here are some reminders why… [More]
