A Steak ‘N Shake manager refused to serve Karen Putz, a deaf mother of three, after she asked to place her order at the drive-thru window as allowed by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The manager claimed it was “policy” to force Karen to order like any other customer:
“You’ll have to drive around again so I can take your order through the speaker,” the guy said.
According to enterprising scientists, people buy last minute Valentine’s Day gifts to avoid a fight, rather than to express love—as any lazy lover can attest. The marketing researchers devised three experiments to prove that our susceptibility to negative advertising is directly impacted by how long we wait to whip out the wallet.
Over at Engadget there is a debate going on about Microsoft and Dell’s collaboration on a (Project) Red XPS PC that is $300 more than the standard XPS, with $80 going towards AIDS relief.
Whenever Andru logs into his Verizon FiOS account, he sees the personal information on some other guy’s account, including name, address, email address, last four digits of credit card and social security number. He’s contacted the other guy, and the other guy also sees his. Verizon has said they will fix it in the next 24 hours. They’ve been saying that for the past eight months. This is supposed to be the future of the internet and they can’t even fix a simple account error?
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Personal finance blog FiLife’s Ron Leiber on why he bought stocks this morning: because he’s nowhere close to retirement. [FiLife]
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On investing in scary times: “The bottom line: If you don’t have a plan, develop one. If you do have one, stick to it,” – Larry Swedroe. [All Financial Matters]
If you’re uncertain about something on your taxes, you can get free tax advice over the phone until Jan. 31, thanks to a special TurboTax promotion at FreeTaxQuestion.com. Just enter your question and name, phone, email, and best time to reach you, and an IRS enrolled tax pro will call you and help you out. If you’re worried that this is just a lead generation ploy, use a disposable email address and disposable phone number. The FiLife blog tried it and had to submit their question twice, but they got it answered and answered good. They said that TurboTax was casually mentioned among the array of options one could use to finish filing, but there was otherwise no overt product pushing.
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The average age of new car buyers in January 2007 was 43. In January 2008, it was 48. This suggests that as the economy tightens, younger car buyers are staying out of the new car market. [Kicking Tires]
Hey St. John’s Dairy Queen workers, you forgot to make your Facebook group private. Now your hilarious little videos of each other mooning the drive-thru and waging indoor snowball fights are all over Canadian television. They just don’t understand your jokes about “using meat the next day that wasn’t kept overnight in the cooler.” Neither do the health inspectors.
Dell has promised to stop shipping individual CDs in 10x19x10 boxes after Christian over at Technologist for Hire posted a rant about Dell’s growing love for wasteful packaging.
Seeing that a $50 fuel surcharge wouldn’t stick, airlines backed down from it, only for most of them to roll out a $40 surcharge. As of now, of the legacy carriers, only Northwest and US Airways have yet to match the increases. Based on how these things trend, airfare bloodhound Rick Seaney expects Northwest and US Airways to pricematch over the weekend. So, if you like flying either of those two airlines as opposed to the budget airlines, buy your tickets now.
Amazon’s new “Subscribe & Save” service lets you sign up to receive shipments of certain goods on a regular basis, meaning that now it’s possible to subscribe to your toilet paper. Or cereal. Or Priolsec. They’re also offering a 15% discount to subscribers. You can choose whether to have the items shipped once every one, two, three or six months. Shipping is free. The service also sends out emails reminding you of an upcoming shipment, with an option to cancel. GTPD: Getting toilet paper done. Nice!
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American Airlines flight attendant throws two snack bags at a passenger’s head, then dumps water on his head, dripping down onto his cashmere sweater. By way of apology, AA gave him 5,000 bonus miles. [Elliot.org]
Phishers are now turning to text messages to get people to fork over their personal banking information. Con artists targeting southwest Missouri sent text messages to hundreds of cellphone users, telling them that their bank account expired and directing them to a fake website with a URL containing the bank’s name. There the website captured the login and password of anyone who logged in. Phishers will use any medium they can. If you receive a message purporting to be from your bank and you’re not sure if it’s legit, call your bank directly to verify its authenticity
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On Monday, NPR interviewed Bob Sullivan, author of “Gotcha Capitalism – How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day — And What You Can Do About It.” (Bob also writes the fine Red Tape Chronicles blog, which we’ve linked to several times). [NPR]
If you want to consolidate balances, you can ask them to waive balance transfer fees…
On 1/8/08, 10 years after he placed a call to Microsoft tech support, they called Brian back to see if his problem had been resolved. Are they just that backed up? Latent Y2K error? Phishing attempt? The truth is much more banal, and potentially, more frightening. See if you can figure out the solution before continuing on to the answer…
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Steven Dentali, who was charged the fee in October after renting a car from Dollar Rent A Car in Manchester, N.H. “I said to them, ‘You’re telling me I’m penalized no matter what? There’s no way around me having to pay something?'”
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