There’s a time-tested rule that if someone gives a child an easy way to unwittingly spend your money, you will soon be looking at a thick bill containing a large number of tiny purchases. Today, a federal court ruled that Amazon failed to do enough to alert Kindle Fire owners — and users of Amazon’s Android appstore — that “Free” apps could still allow kids to make costly in-app transactions. [More]
Retail Services
Amazon To Expand Same-Day Prime Delivery To All Of Boston… Eventually
By 4.27.16
Free same-day delivery is a nice perk that millions of Amazon Prime customers in and near major cities nationwide have access to. But not all access is created equal, as a recent investigation found out, and the map of who was being excluded has some unpleasant undertones. In Boston at least, the city with the most obvious delivery hole, Amazon is now changing its tune and will expand service to all residents. [More]
Wells Fargo To Pay $8M To Settle West Virginia Lawsuit Against Company It Acquired in 2001
By 4.26.16
Eleven years ago, West Virginia accused an insurance broker called Acordia of improperly pocketing millions of dollars in commissions. Acordia is now doing business under the Wells Fargo banner, and the big bank has agreed to pay $8 million to settle this decade-old lawsuit. [More]
NatureBox Expands From Podcast Ads To Store Shelves At Target
By 4.26.16
NatureBox, a subscription box offering curated selections of healthy(ish) snacks, is a company that you may not be familiar with…unless you’re a fan of podcasts, in which case you’re probably tired of hearing about NatureBox, since they’re a frequent advertiser in that medium. Now the company is reaching out to the rest of the population in a partnership with Target, putting its snacks on store shelves. [More]
Amazon Sues Five Sites Promising Reviews For Cash
By 4.26.16
Since filing its first lawsuit to block companies from selling fraudulent positive reviews last April, Amazon has taken a number of steps to cutback on the number of fake review peppering its site: data mining reviewers’ personal relationships, tweaking how reviews appear on product pages, and suing more than 1,100 individual reviewers who sell their kind words. Now the e-commerce giant has sued five additional sites, accusing them of selling sham reviews. [More]
Walmart Ditching Wild Oats Organic Brand After 2 Years
By 4.25.16
Two years ago, Walmart announced that it would sell inexpensive organic food to a mass market under the Wild Oats brand, at lower prices than national brands of certified organic products. After just about 2 years, Walmart is ending its Wild Oats experiment, deciding instead to begin selling organic items under its own house brand, Great Value, and also sell more fresh produce. [More]
Walmart Price For 11-Year-Old MobiBLU MP3 Player Falls To A Record Low $55
By 4.25.16
Back in 2005, a Korean company introduced a tiny cube-shaped MP3 player that had more features than the then-dominant iPod Shuffle. The adorable MobiBLU included a voice recorder and an FM tuner, and was a Walmart exclusive item in the United States that came with free Walmart music store downloads. While those songs self-destructed back in 2008, the devices haven’t gone anywhere. You can find them on Walmart’s shelves, often at full price. [More]
Yeah, You’re Going To Have To Pay For Your Kid’s Promposal, Too
By 4.25.16
We have either good or bad news for high school students and for their parents: promposals, or elaborate staged events where one teen asks another to the prom, aren’t going away, and have become as much an essential part of the prom-going experience as cummberbunds and corsages. Seeing how popular they are with teens, companies that sell or rent prom clothes have started marketing guides, promoting their brands but also reinforcing elaborate promposals as the norm. [More]
Amazon Makes Some Games Only Available On Prime, But Good Luck Guessing Which Ones
By 4.25.16
Amazon Prime started out a few years back as a way for power users to save on quick shipping. These days, it sometimes feels instead like Amazon is crawling one inch at a time toward a Costco-style membership-only future behind the Prime gates. The latest goods to move behind the velvet rope? A bunch of big-name video games. [More]
15 Types Of Frozen Vegetables Sold At Costco, Meijer Recalled Over Listeria Concerns
By 4.25.16
For the second time this month packages of frozen vegetables sold at national retailers has been recalled for possible listeria contamination. CRF Frozen Foods issued a recall of 15 frozen vegetable products sold at Costco and Meijer stores over the weekend. [More]
Report: Sears Would Need To Close Nearly Half Its Stores To Succeed
By 4.25.16
While last week’s announced closings of 78 Sears Holdings stores made headlines, the company has been quietly culling retail locations for years. But a new analysis of the department store sector concludes that Sears and other mall mainstays are far from finished with eliminating stores. [More]
Costco Expected To Raise Membership Fees By 10% Sometime In The Next Year
By 4.22.16
The cost of a yearly Costco membership could be going up in the near future: according to analysts at UBS, the retailer is probably going to raise prices by 10% by late this year or early 2017. [More]
Sears Holdings Will Close Additional 68 Kmart Stores, 10 Sears Stores
By 4.22.16
In their recent rounds of store closings, Sears Holdings tried something new: they announced them to the stores’ local news outlets, but didn’t release a nationwide list of stores slated to close. We started compiling our own list based on local news stories and reader tips at the beginning of this year. Late Thursday, Sears Holdings announced an additional 78 store closings, and saved us some work by putting out a national list. Scheduled to close in this round are 65 Kmarts, 3 Super K stores, and ten Sears stores. [More]
Amazon Stays On Trend, Closes Flash Sale Site Myhabit.com
By 4.21.16
Flash sale fashion sites were a hot retail category during the recession, when high-end retailers had lots of inventory to get rid of. They proliferated, the bubble burst, with big players like Fab, Gilt, and Zulily all acquired by larger companies. Amazon started its own flash-sale site for fashion, MyHabit.com, in 2011 when the category was still growing, but announced that the site will close in May, just as Amazon is working to sell more of its own private-label and other brands’ clothing. [More]
In 6 Cities, Amazon Same-Day Delivery Available In More White ZIP Codes Than Black Ones
By 4.21.16
Effective same-day delivery is kind of the holy grail of online retail right now: being able to get your hands on that thing you need right now when you need it is the one advantage brick-and-mortar stores still have, and it’s the one Amazon in particular wants to chip away at. The list of cities where Amazon promises Prime subscribers access to same-day delivery keeps getting longer, but there’s a snag: not all addresses within a city are considered equal, and the pattern to the areas without access looks distressingly familiar. [More]
Here’s Why The Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Aren’t Really Funny
By 4.20.16
We regularly post discoveries from what we call the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, usually obsolete technology that is still on the shelf at comically high prices. It’s fun to laugh at the ancient digital cameras, defunct multiplayer games, and indestructible classic phones on the shelf, but the electronics clearance shelf can be a hazardous place for people who don’t read fine print. [More]
Amazon Unintentionally Paying Scammers To Hand You 1000 Pages Of Crap You Don’t Read
By 4.20.16
For a certain kind of reader — the kind who can go through three books a week easy on her commute, let’s say — an unlimited subscription, wireless, e-book service sounds like a dream come true. That’s what Amazon promises with their Kindle Unlimited service, but the plan may be backfiring — not so much on readers, but on authors and on Amazon itself. [More]
You’re Not Supposed To Receive Amazon Orders In Walmart And Sam’s Club Boxes
By 4.20.16
Buying an item on Amazon’s site doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily buying that item from Amazon. This can lead to serious confusion when you try to make a warranty claim, and seriously confuses some customers when a box from Walmart shows up on their doorstep with their Amazon order. Why would that happen? If a box from a different retailer shows up on your doorstep, it means that your seller is playing the retail arbitrage game and breaking Amazon’s rules. [More]
